1491: A Walk In The Park

Just finished reading 1491, Charles C. Mann’s 2005 account of the pre-Columbian Americas. Pulling together all the latest historical research, including the many disputes and controversies, Mann intends his book as a collection of revelations dispelling myths perpetrated by our school history books about the Americas before European contact. Mann’s wind up is so big, and the beginning of the book so slow going, that you might give up before getting to the good stuff. What Mann calls “Holmsberg’s Mistake,” is the notion, repeated by many European settlers and anthropologists, based on contact with small, remote tribes, that pre-Columbian Americas was a land virtually “empty of mankind and its works,” a tabula rasa. In fact, pre-Columbian numbers of people in the Americas may have exceeded 100 million. An agricultural revolution based on the domestication of corn, beans, and squash spreading out from Central Mexico reached as far north as New England. Okay, I’ve heard this before. And it wasn’t so much the steel and horses and long-distance ships, the technological advantages, that enabled Europeans to subdue Indian populations upon contact but the devastating diseases that opened the way for colonists. As much as 20% of the world’s population was lost as the result of the smallpox and measles viruses unleashed by the Columbian contact with the Americas. I’ve heard this, too. But a slightly later agricultural revolution in South America in an area of Northern Peru known Norte Chico (a forerunner to the Inca), with monumental architecture and other trappings of civilization, was not based on agricultural food surpluses at all but a complex relationship between cotton cultivation and fishing. This may not sound like such a big deal but it does upset a formula sacrosanct in textbooks: i.e., the rise of civilizations was made possible by agricultural food surpluses of wheat (Fertile Crescent), rice (China), and corn (Mesoamerica). Where the beginning of writing in Sumer is based on accounting, in Mesoamerica the impulse towards writing was timekeeping and led to the creation of a complex system of calendars. There is evidence of the use of Zero by the Olmec long before Ptolemy. Perhaps most significantly, Mann drives home the point that the early Americas were not an Edenic wilderness. That they appeared so to early colonizers, vast plains of buffalo and tangles of impenetrable forest, was largely because of the imbalance caused by the diseases that preceded the colonial settlers. It looked that way because so many of the people who had shaped the land had died off. “Holmsberg’s Mistake” is manifested today by a purist strain of environmentalism that values only untouched wilderness and opposes or is uninterested in any other kind of land stewardship. But, in fact, the shorelines, forests, rivers of pre-Columbian Americas were widely shaped by human choice and action. So much so that to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, that inhabited the Amazon river basin before Columbus their homeland was not a rainforest but a patchwork of orchards.