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1491:New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles Mann
A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.
Knopf
August 2005
480 pages ISBN: 140004006X Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the
ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western
Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed
the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly
in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land
that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a
vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear,
archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last
thirty years proving these and many other long-held
assumptions wrong. In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a
new generation of researchers equipped with novel
scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of
conclusions. Among them: * In 1491 there were probably more people living in the
Americas than in Europe.
* Certain cities-such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital-
were far greater in population than any contemporary
European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any
capital in Europe at that time, had running water,
beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean
streets.
* The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were
thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.
* Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a
breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science
recently described it as "man’s first, and perhaps the
greatest, feat of genetic engineering."
* Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest
without destroying it-a process scientists are studying
today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.
* Native Americans transformed their land so completely
that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already
massively "landscaped" by human beings. Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive
at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how
they have affected our understanding of our history and our
thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and
learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.
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