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1491
(Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles C. Mann
Paperback from Vintage
Media Published: 2006-
ISBN: 1400032059
In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles
C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival
of Columbus in 1492.
Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian
Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there
were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land
around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running
water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary
European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding
process that it has been called man's first feat of genetic engineering.
Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping
and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to
understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look
at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.
1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year
stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human
civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the
party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on
describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory,
sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before
the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among
the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries
Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have
been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have
come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the
Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a
far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region
than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony
with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents,
to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest
can be seen as products of human intervention.
Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily
speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific
measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades.
But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among
the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many
of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting
of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and
found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues
convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native
American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was
likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases
introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity,
which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought
it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow
of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom
Nissley
A 1491 Timeline
| Europe and Asia |
Dates |
The Americas |
|
25000-35000 B.C. |
Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia,
according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific
in boats. |
| Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer. |
6000 |
|
|
5000 |
In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and
greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically
breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species. |
| First cities established in Sumer. |
4000 |
|
|
3000 |
The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of
at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like
structures |
| Great Pyramid at Giza |
2650 |
|
|
32 |
First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention,
widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made,
which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was
not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the
1700s) |
|
800-840 A.D. |
Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face
of severe drought and lengthy war |
| Vikings briefly establish first European settlements in
North America. |
1000 |
 |
| Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.* |
Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of
the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000. |
| Black Death devastates Europe. |
1347-1351 |
|
|
1398 |
Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist
behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within
decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on
Earth. |
| The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean. |
1492 |
The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean. |
| Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning
crew. |
1493 |
|
| Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world
voyage. |
1519 |
 |
| Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the
effects of smallpox** |
Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance,
and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen
in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire. |
|
1525-1533 |
The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much
as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest
by Spanish forces led by Pizarro. |
|
1617 |
Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic
brought by shipwrecked French sailors. |
| English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied
by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth. |
1620 |
|
| *Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State
Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. **Courtesy
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagún,
Historia
General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1547-77). |
|
| |
Zeitoun
by Dave Eggers
The true story of one family, caught between America's two biggest
policy disasters: the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Listed under Hurricanes
Laboratory
Manual in Physical Geology (9th Edition)
by AGI M. American Geological Institute, Richard M. National Association
of Geoscience Teachers, Richard M. Busch
Spiral-bound from Prentice Hall
ISBN: 0321689577
This user-friendly, best-selling lab manual examines the basic processes
of geology and their applications to everyday life. Featuring contributions
from over 170 highly regarded geologists and geoscience educators, along
with an exceptional illustration program by Dennis Tasa, Laboratory
Manual in Physical Geology, Ninth Edition offers a new activities-based
approach that gives you a more complete learning experience in the lab. |
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Bibliography
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Book Description Thirty years in the making, this bibliography
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Publisher: American Geological Institute; 1st edition
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It's Raining Frogs and Fishes, a lighthearted look at the world's weather,
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