Discount Shopping Online :: Books 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus : :

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by: Charles C. Mann

List Price: $15.95

Amazon.com's Price: $10.85

You Save: $5.10 (32%)
Prices subject to change.

Used Price: $7.50
Collectible Price: $14.95
Third Party New Price: $8.99

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 970.01
EAN: 9781400032051
ISBN: 1400032059
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 541
Publication Date: October 10, 2006
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: October 10, 2006
Sales Rank: 1623
Studio: Vintage

Related Items:

Editorial Review:

Product Description:
In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. From the astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which had running water, immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city, to the Mexican corn that was so carefully created in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

Amazon.com Review:
1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even 'timeless' natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley

A 1491 Timeline

Europe and Asia

Dates

The Americas

25000-35000 B.C.

Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats.

Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer.

6000

5000

In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species.

First cities established in Sumer.

4000

3000

The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structures

Great Pyramid at Giza

2650

First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s)

800-840 A.D.

Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war

Vikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America.

1000

Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.*

Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000.

Black Death devastates Europe.

1347-1351

1398

Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Earth.

The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.

1492

The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.

Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew.

1493

Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage.

1519

Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox**

Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire.

1525-1533

The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro.

1617

Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors.

English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth.

1620

*Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. **Courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1547-77).

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- It's about time
It's about time we shed our Euro-centric views and gave more credit to the indigenous people that were here first. This book is well written and makes use of the research of others. It is nicely organized and collected together in one place. None is original research and not too surprising if you are familar with the field. However if this is new to you then you might be in for a surprise, history is not quite the way you might have been taught. A good quick read, lively, engaging and thought provoking. I enjoyed this book very much and look forward to more from the same author.

rmw

Rating:

- Book Review
In this beautifully written book Charles C. Mann recollects his journey to old tribal communties in what is now America. This book holds many facts that are amazing and your idea of what the US was like before Columbus will change drastically. Charles Mann tells lost stories of lies and betrayal between the Indians and the early explorers who landed on the coast of America. Many assumptions about what the Indians were like are completely contradicted in this book, although bold at time all of the facts are true and seem to line up perfectly. Although lacking cities of gold the Americas did have sophisticated technology in some tribes, even more ahead than their un familiar rivals in Europe. Early interactions between the first people to land on the United States are extordanary and just imagine how complicated it was with almost no communication possible. These early trades were great but also left some American ... Read More

Rating:

- Probably one of my favorite non fiction reads of all time
I will keep this brief and to the point. I read a lot of non-fiction. In fact, one of the reasons I cannot bring myself to read another novel is THIS BOOK. I have gotten more from Mann's 1491 than any other I have read over the last five years--maybe more. I recommend that prospective college/high school students read this and learn.

Rating:

- Overly Ambitious
"1491" is a journalist's look at pre-Columbian America. It is an overly ambitious, oftentimes confusing assortment of fact, theory, archaeology, geography, genetics, anthropology, ethnography and almost every other science and pseudoscience that can be applied to the study of ancient and recent native Americans.

In my opinion, the author would have been far better off to have thoroughly expored a couple of themes rather than to have hop-scotched over the Americas both temporally and geographically. Even the title--1491--is misleading because the author spends much time discussing European contacts with the natives. He also wastes time highlighting the personal disputes between various scholars.

I would have much preferred an in-depth discussion of 1491 populations in various parts of the continents with evidence of the impact of European diseases. To be sure, the author discusses this ... Read More

Discount Shopping Online Books and Publications

Books : 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Search the web for info about 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Discount Shopping Online Books and Publications

Books : 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before ColumbusBooks and Publications Average Rating:

Search the web for info about 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Books : 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Books and Publications Average Rating: