1491: Uncovering the History of the Americas Before Christopher Columbus

P. O'Callaghan: Well written

United States on Dec 01, 2023

Ernie cardinal1: Fast and great delivery. Read the first few pages and it’s a grabber of your attention!!

Canada on Nov 29, 2023

Pat: Great book! Accurate and detailed. A true historical accounting.

United States on Nov 19, 2023

Finnegan's Father: I came upon this book by accident, and it turned out to be one of the greats.

First, this is packed with interesting history about events on the American continent prior to the arrival of Columbus (with some attention to the years soon after). I thought I had done pretty well keeping up with history, but who knew? A lot more civilizations rose and fell than I had ever heard of, and for those who like to think about the "normal" arc of a civilization, there's a lot here to think about.

Second, while being enlightening as to human history, there's also a lot of insight about nature -- some of it extremely interesting to me. Put succinctly, the untapped wilderness that preceded European interference... turns out to be a misleading half truth. Very interesting information about both North and South America in this regard.

Third, I found the book interesting in the light it shed on the way the commonly accepted history has been warped both by those with a conservative and those with liberal agendas.

Finally, I admire the realistic account of the academic wars that occurred along the way to figuring out the facts, to the extent to which they are now known. I...

United States on Oct 06, 2023

Jawbox: An engaging and culturally rich book which displays a rich range of knowledge and many years’ study. I came to this book after reading one of Mann’s articles in National Geographic where I was struck by the sensitivity and grasp he had of the topic (not always a luxury in journalistic coverage but something many feature writers would ideally like to achieve). The book challenges conventional nationalistic history using an evidence-based approach, rather than polemic, and with an engaging humorous and anecdotal structure. The book is rightly (gently) critical of the way that the topic has been dealt with from an imperialist academic perspective and highlighting the often obfuscated role of the ordinary people who came across archaeological sites. At the same time it pulls no punches when discussing the politicisation of Mesoamerican histories, whether imperialist apology or native activism. A series of endnotes and bibliographic sources opens the door to further enquiry.

United Kingdom on Oct 24, 2022

William C. Mahaney: ‘1491’ by Charles C. Mann

Charles Mann’s subtitle ‘New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus’ aptly summarizes much of what is in this provocative and engaging book that paints a broad rethink of what the New World was like just before Columbus sailed into Hispaniola. Columbus and others after him thought they had reached Asia, a pristine land inhabited by savages; hence, they referred to local inhabitants as Indians, successive populations of which they subjugated by force of arms with the aim of religious conversion tied to a civilizing effort. Aside from taking the reader back to various theories of populating the Americas, starting with the decay of ice sheets in the north, his chapter called the ‘Pleistocene Wars’ focuses on the contentious theory of what caused the demise of the Clovis Culture, the earliest immigrants who are thought to be responsible for the extinction of local megafauna including the mammoth, sabre-toothed cat, horse etc. The archaeological argument that the Clovis population over-killed the mammoth-sabre-toothed cat-horse population has been discounted by a new theory that a comet impact (black mat event) or airburst 12,800...

Canada on Aug 30, 2020

Walter W. Olson, Ph.D, P.E.: Charles C. Mann’s book, 1491, provides us with an eye opener about the pre-Columbus populations of the North and South America. It is not an easy read: it is very detailed and well researched with references to critical scientific studies. It is not a chronological or systematic account, and this makes the book somewhat disjointed. Mann’s main intents were to examine Indian demography, Indian origins and Indian ecology.

In my opinion, he is not successful in the first objective of describing Indian demography. However, I doubt there are enough research available to tackle this objective. They may never be enough research as there were multiple occupations of land by unknown populations throughout the period from the first arrivals of the peoples loosely described as Indians to the present day. Also, the populations were dynamic, growing and shrinking depending on the social and natural environments of various groups of Indians. The task may just be too difficult to build a record of Indian populations prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Mann has tried to report the research faithfully but the Indian populations of Western United States and that of Argentina in...

United States on Feb 19, 2019

flashgordon: Highlights of the dark ages were the Spanish Arabs and the Byzantine. A people that were partly protected from the Germanic barbarians of the dark ages by the Byzantines was the Venitians. They'd go on to dominate the second half of the dark ages(from 1000 A.d to about 1500 A.D. Part of what happened was the Byzantine's were overrun by the Turks in the mid 1400s. Now, if you wanted to get silk and spices from the mysterious east, you needed to pay crazy amount of money or find another way. The Europeans found another way. - find the Aristotle quote and note it here - I think I've noted it in my finite and infinite write up.

I've put up pictures of the Haglia Sophia before, but why not show it again?

I'll just say watch John Romer's Testament episode 6 I do believe for good video of the inside and outside of the Haglia Sophia. He goes straight up the outside doors and knocks on them . . . and opens them up! It's like something out of the 'Lord of the Rings"!

How about a Venice picture,

When the Portuguese, Spanish, English and French went west, they found a world of riches. This wealth essentially made Venice a relic of the past. A measure of the fame...

United States on Oct 16, 2014

Oparazzo: Amerika vor Kolumbus - Ein Forschungsgebiet, das in den letzten Jahren kräftig aufgemischt wurde. Vor allen zu drei Themenkomplexen hat sich die Mehrheitsmeinung der Forscher deutlich verschoben:

1. Die erste Besiedlung Amerikas liegt viel länger zurück und die entstandenen Gesellschaften sowohl in Nord- als auch in Südamerika waren schon vor Jahrtausenden viel weiter entwickelt als gemeinhin angenommen.

2. die Bevölkerungsdichte war erheblich größer und stand der in europäischen und asiatischen Zivilisationszentren in keiner Weise nach;

3. die Uramerikaner haben ihre Umwelt ganz erheblich mitgestaltet; der vorkolumbianische edle Wilde in unberührter Natur ist ein schöner, aber leider unzutreffender Mythos.

Auch wenn neue Funde und Techniken, hier vor allem die Radiokarbonmethode, einiges Licht in das Halbdunkel der Historie gebracht haben, werden dennoch alle diese Fragen bis heute kontrovers und emotional diskutiert, wobei Empfindlichkeiten der Forscher ebenso eine Rolle spielen wie Empfindlichkeiten der Beforschten. Zum Beispiel die Größe der Völker, die damals von den eingeschleppten Seuchen Europas nahezu ausgelöscht wurden: Je nach...

Germany on Feb 17, 2014

therealus: Prior to the arrival of Columbus, the American continent, north to south, was home to thriving communities of people who built extensive road networks, cities of heroic proportions and sophisticated water management systems which often defied the inhospitability of the environments in which they existed. Over the years some of these civilisations conspired to destroy themselves and each other, some were irreparably damaged by the depredations of acquisitive, disease-carrying Europeans, and others mysteriously faded and vanished. Until quite recently, virtually all have been ostracised by mainstream history books (particularly, Mann points out, American school textbooks), and those that have not have been misrepresented, misunderstood and misnamed.

For me, one revelation of Charles Mann's 1491 stands out as testimony to the sheer depth of the civilisations of which he writes: the story of maize. Maize, or corn, that deliciously sweet, dazzlingly yellow, phenomenally versatile crop was one of the cornerstones of the pre-Colombian American diet. It was bred to come in all sorts of colours as well as yellow, that here in Europe we seldom if ever get to see. And it stands...

United Kingdom on Aug 28, 2009