In the traditional Eurocentric view of world
history, the western hemisphere in 1491 was a pristine wilderness populated by
a scattering of people living in harmony with their environment. In this extensively
researched volume (over 500 pages plus 200 more of appendices, bibliography,
etc.) 1491 (2004) by Charles C Mann debunks all of that. The Americas
were densely populated with many sophisticated cultures that managed the
environment. One of several books updating world history. Other notable ones are
The Dawn of Everything (2021) by David Graeber and Guns,
Germs, and Steel (1997) by Jared Diamond.
The most recent research identifies many sophisticated, populous civilizations beyond the territory Incas and the Aztecs across the continental U.S. and in the Amazon basin. One of the major themes of this volume is the level of environmental management. There were no virgin environments. In North America, the people managed the forests by regularly burning and planting specific trees. They also managed wildlife populations. The eastern forests and massive Midwest bison herds only developed after smallpox depopulated the local land managers. In the Amazon basin, massive projects prepared the land for cultivation to support large populations.
In the last chapter of this book (Coda) the author touches on the
question of the influence of the North American philosophers on the European
enlightenment. Ten years later, The Dawn of Everything (2021) by David
Graeber reports the extensive research supporting this thesis.
Interesting engineering. Since the Inca didn’t have iron, they
based their engineering on the tensile strength of fibers (cotton) instead of
the compression strength of (steel). For example, they built bridges, but
differently. The Europeans had arches and the Americans had catenaries.
Wheels: A popular argument for the backwardness of the Americas is “no
wheels.” They had axles and wheels but only used them for children’s toys.
Wheels were useless in swampy places such as the Amazon and Mesoamerica or the
steep (steps) roads in the Andes. So why have wheels?
Corn: Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon
if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the
world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central
America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers,
essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few
domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates
around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths
of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica.
The latest research on the rise of
civilization across the Americas.
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