1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

"Charles Mann’s 1491 is subtitled “New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”. He pulls together a lot of the new research over the last generation in one place and provides the reader with a helicopter overview of the American hemisphere on the eve of contact. He goes into a great deal of detail and from that a reader gets a very different picture, not just of the Americas in 1491, but also the whole world in 1491. Mann shows that the Americas were not just an empty world waiting for Europeans to arrive and create a greater American nation – but a place where civilisation had risen and fallen, where there were great cities that contained probably as much population as Europe at the time, if not more, where corn agriculture had transformed large areas of the continent, and where Indian people had created changes in the land that left their imprint on the environment. The book provides a huge hemispheric overview. People are working in Native American history in all kinds of areas. There are new discoveries, it seems, every year in archaeology. Increasingly, native scholars are making their voices heard and scholars who are not native are much more receptive to that. Anthropologists, in the last generation or so, more often work with historical sources and historians are drawing on the work of these anthropologists so there’s a whole new range of inquiry triggering new understandings of the role of native people in how America develops. One area where that is particularly true is the whole issue of population. One of the larger changes in understanding has to do with the size of the population before contact and the extent of the population collapse after contact. Back in the old days, people would throw about estimates of pre-Columbian population north of Mexico as maybe a million. Now, as a result of the work of experts in demography and epidemiology, we have a much greater understanding of population dynamics. When Europeans were in an area doing head counts, more often than not they were recording the number of survivors of epidemics like smallpox, influenza, measles, and other crowd-killing diseases that came to America with Europeans but were not present in America beforehand. The cumulative effect of these epidemics on the native population throughout the hemisphere was absolute devastation. As one scholar described it, it was one of the greatest biological disasters in human history. Some people argue about the numbers; some people question the calculations. But I think the important point is the revisions of population estimates, wherever they land, leave us with a different impression of pre-contact America. It was not an empty or sparsely inhabited continent but a world full of Indians. It was a place where much of the world’s population lived and the impact of contact played out through epidemic disease shifted that dramatically. You can’t understand the subsequent history of America without understanding that population collapse."