1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus review

Charles Mann's 1491 sets out to correct a widespread misconception: that the Americas before Columbus were a mostly empty wilderness populated by small, isolated bands of hunter-gatherers living in gentle harmony with an untouched nature. The picture that has emerged from archaeology, genetics, ecology, and epidemiology over the past several decades is radically different. The pre-Columbian Americas were densely populated, deeply engineered, and home to some of the most sophisticated civilizations in the world at the time of contact.

Mann argues on three main fronts. First, the population: estimates of pre-contact indigenous populations have revised sharply upward, with some scholars arguing that the Americas had more people than Europe in 1491. The catastrophic collapse that followed contact — from diseases to which American populations had no immunity — may have killed 90 percent of the hemisphere's inhabitants within a century. Second, the technology: from the terraformed soils of Amazonia (the "dark earths" of the terra preta) to the engineered flood plains of the Maya lowlands, indigenous peoples actively managed their landscapes at a continental scale. The "untouched wilderness" that European settlers encountered was in many cases a recently emptied landscape still showing the scars of demographic collapse. Third, the political and social complexity: the Aztec empire, the Inca road system, and the Haudenosaunee confederacy (which may have influenced American democratic thought) represent levels of political organization that the received story of primitive peoples substantially underestimates.