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The Red Road - Natural Ways -
News and Misc
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by Ben Dangl
June 19, 2006
Upside Down World
In many high school history classes students are told that before
Columbus arrived the Americas were full of untamed wilderness loosely
populated with savage Indians. Charles Mann's book, 1491: New
Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus proves that the opposite is
true.
He draws from recent archeological and scientific discoveries to
describe booming civilizations which thrived throughout the Americas
centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Like Howard Zinn's A People's
History of the United States this book made me want to call up my old
history teachers and tell them they were very wrong. In fact, Mann's
self-described thesis is to show that indigenous societies before the
arrival of Columbus deserve more than a few misleading pages in a
textbook.
Mann was able to hold my attention not just with the details of complex
indigenous societies, but also with controversies, adventures and
divisions among the scientists and archeologists which have contributed
to what we know of pre-Columbian history. Not only is he able to make
squabbles between European archeologists interesting, but he's able to
smoothly describe scientific data and Mayan politics in the same breath.
The book is brimming with shocking information like the fact that the
city of Tiwanaku, in what is now Bolivia, had 115,000 people living in
it in 1000 A.D., a population that Paris would not reach for five
centuries. Among other surprises we learn that Pocahontas means "little
hellion" and there are less people living in the Amazon now than there
were in 1491. Mann points out that the British and French, not the
indigenous people, were the savages. The Europeans arriving in North
America smelled horrible; some of them had never taken a bath their
whole lives. On the other hand, the indigenous people were generally
very clean, strong and well nourished.
The first section of the book deals largely with new revelations about
the sicknesses such as small pox and Hepatitis A which ravaged the
native populations of the Americas shortly after the arrival of the
Europeans. The death toll is as surprising as the size of the
populations before Columbus. When Columbus landed, there were an
estimated 25 million people living in Mexico. At the time, there were
only 10 million people in Spain and Portugal. Central Mexico was more
densely populated than China or India when Columbus arrived. An
estimated 90-112 million lived in the Americas, which was a larger
population than that of Europe. Mann also pointed out that the Incas
ruled the biggest empire on earth ever. In their prime, the kingdom's
span equaled the distance between St. Petersburg and Cairo.
The bloodshed unleashed by the Europeans had a lot do with killing off
of these populations. Yet sickness played perhaps an even larger role.
Smallpox hit the Andes before Spain's Pizarro did, killing off most
people and plunging the area into civil war. The sickness is thought to
have arrived to the region from the Caribbean. Hepatitis A killed off an
estimated 90% of the population in coastal New England in 3 years.
Within first years of European contact, 95% of native populations died.
These numbers seem hard to believe, but Mann's exhausting research draws
from decades of investigations from dozens of scientists and
archeologists.
While reading this book, I realized how inaccurate it is to describe the
Americas as the "New World." Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Americas were inhabited by people 20-30,0000 years ago. Europe, on
the other hand, was occupied by humans more recently, 18,000 years ago
at the most.
This book proves that the wilderness in the Americas before the
Europeans arrived was far from wild and untouched by humans. Mann argues
that pre-Columbus wilderness was totally affected and shaped by the
native people that lived there. For example, the Mayans destroyed their
own environment; they cut down too many trees and exhausted the soil. As
their population expanded the environment and agriculture could no
longer sustain them. This greatly contributed to their collapse.
Other indigenous groups altered their ecosystems to facilitate their
survival. Societies in the Amazon regularly burned down vast expanses of
the forest; the charred soil was good for agriculture and the fire
flushed out animals for food. The plains the US are believed to be a
result of similar forest-burning techniques. Indigenous hunters before
Columbus sought out pregnant animals to lower the population; indigenous
people competed with animals for food, berries and nuts. Indigenous
societies also built vast canals, cities, irrigation systems, large
agricultural fields, entirely changing the wilderness for human use.
When the first European explorers passed over the Mississippi they saw
millions of bison and other animals. This was not because indigenous
people didn't hunt them. In fact, these animal populations were large
because their predators, the indigenous people, had been killed off by
European sicknesses. Similarly, the death from these sicknesses allowed
ecosystems to thrive without the impact of humans until the European
colonies expanded. What Europeans actually saw when they fully explored
and settled in "wilder" regions was the death of the landscape shaped by
indigenous cultures.
Though I was in awe of such revelations and the vast research Mann put
into the book, I couldn't help but wonder about his sources. I know that
most indigenous societies did not have any extensive written history,
and so much of what is known about their day to day life, culture, wars
and religion is guesswork. Mann's book is based primarily on research,
analysis and theories from Europeans and North Americans. Perhaps this
reflects the academic, scientific and archeological world more than it
does Mann's approach. However, I wanted to hear more from contemporary
Mayan, Mapuche, Incan and Aymara people about their own versions of this
history, people who still practice these ancient politics, customs and
religions. Stories and histories exist among descendent of these
civilizations, but Mann doesn't draw from them enough.
My wariness of his choice of sources increased when he described
visiting ruins in Peru and commented on a "curious sight":
"�[S]kulls from the cemetery, gathered into several small piles.
Around them were beer cans, cigarette butts, patent-medicine bottles,
half-burned photographs and candles shaped like naked women. These last
had voodoo pins stuck in their heads and vaginas. Local people came to
these places at night and either dug for treasure or practiced
witchcraft, Haas [Mann's archeologist friend] said. In the harsh
afternoon light they seemed to me tacky and sad."
This sounds similar to the kind of disdain with which the Spanish looked
upon indigenous religions when they first arrived. How does Mann know
that this "witchcraft" isn't a modern day version of what the Incas
practiced? Instead of ancient broken pottery and gold jewelry, he found
beer bottles and photographs. Why does he immediately dismiss this as
"tacky and sad"? Could this "witchcraft" serve as a gateway to
understanding ancient Andean religions? Elsewhere in the book he
criticizes locals who rob from the ruins to sell gold and artifacts to
feed their families. I'd say that gold is put to better use feeding a
family than sitting in a museum. Observations such as these from Mann
made me think even more about the millions of indigenous voices left out
of this book about indigenous societies.
None the less, it deserves to be required reading in high schools along
with the many other books which have taken on the "official" histories
of the hemisphere.
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