“Instead, this book explores what I believe to be the three main foci of the new findings: Indian demography (Part I), Indian origins (Part II) and Indian ecology (Part III). Nor, he writes, is it a “full intellectual history of the recent changes in perspective among the anthropologists, archeologists, ecologists, geographers, and historians who study the first Americans,” a similarly impossible task since so many new ideas “are still rippling outward in too many directions” to be contained in a single work.
Such a book, he comments, would need to be so vast in scope in terms of space and time that it would be impossible to write. Demography, origins and ecologyĪt the beginning of 1491, Mann alerts the reader that his book isn’t a systematic, chronological account of the Western Hemisphere’s cultural and social development before Europeans arrived. Mann, though, knew - and found out even more as he researched - that those ideas were very much out of date. It was that primordial wildness that, starting in the mid-20 th century, environmentalists asserted was the ideal - an ideal to use as the template in protecting the few “virgin” areas left and in reconstructing such wildernesses. It remained pure because the Indians were so technologically primitive and used the land so lightly. In other words, when Christopher Columbus and his crews became the first Europeans to record a visit to the Western Hemisphere, who were the Indians that they found? How many Indians were there in what became known as North America and South America? What were the cultures and civilizations of the Indians? What was the relationship of the Indians to their landscapes? How long had they been there?įor much of the past five hundred years, the answers to those questions, as presented in textbooks and general histories, were that, at the time Columbus arrived, Indians had loosely settled the two continents and, with a few exceptions, lived nomadic lives, hunting and gathering and living off the bounty of the land.Īnd the land they lived on was primeval Nature, a virgin landscape, as pristine as when the Indians arrived. “What was the New World like at the time of Columbus?” Nomadic Indians and virgin landscapes That thesis could be summarized in a question that Mann read in an article in a technical journal in 1992: So, it’s not very surprising that his book has the feel of several long magazine stories packaged together under a single thesis. Indeed, at many points in 1491, Mann describes encounters he had with archeologists and visits he made to ancient sites while carrying out magazine assignments. But he had specialized in writing magazine pieces on scientific subjects for such publications as Fortune, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, Science, the Atlantic Monthly and Wired. Mann had co-authored a few books on science and technology. Prior to publishing 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus in 2006, Charles C.
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