1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

are known with relative certainty, Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died.

When Columbus landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile than China or India.

Based on their work and his own, Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

the epidemics killed about one out of every five people on earth. According to W. George Lovell, a geographer at Queen’s University in Ontario, it was “the greatest destruction of lives in human history.”

” Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. When plague appeared, they boarded up houses and fled to the countryside. By contrast, the historian Neal Salisbury observed, family and friends in Indian New England gathered at the sufferer’s bedside to wait out the illness, a practice that “could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly.” Even the idea of contagion itself was novel. “We had no belief that one Man could give [a disease] to another,” the Blackfoot raider remembered, “any more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another.” Because they knew of no protective measures, the toll was even higher than it would have been.

the sun needed a “marketplace” where he could “go with his army [that is, the army of the Triple Alliance] to buy victims, men for him to eat.… And this will be a good thing, for it will be as if he had his maize cakes hot from the griddle—tortillas from a nearby place, hot and ready to eat whenever he wishes them.”

Many if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: “a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as dreams, the tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature beyond human experience.

Ayocuan was suggesting, León-Portilla said, that there is a time when humankind can touch the enduring truths that underlie our fleeting lives. That time is at the moment of artistic creation.

British ships in the nineteenth century radically transformed native art by giving the Indians brightly colored paints that unlike native pigments didn’t wash off in the rain. Indians incorporated the new pigments into their traditions, expanding them and in the process creating an aesthetic nouvelle vague.

People with similar mitochondria have, in the jargon, the same “haplogroup.”

Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, took over the excavations, shouldering Figgins aside.

After an unprovoked attack on Red and White Bundle by Tilantongo raised hostilities to a fever, the warring parties agreed to meet in a sacred mountain cave with the Priestess of the Dead, a powerful oracle who had stripped away the flesh from her jaw, giving her a terrifying, skull-like appearance.

The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s will; “great beast,” in which the rulers’ power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and “great fraud,” in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority.

The head of the creature faced the user, who sucked in tobacco smoke from its mouth. Adena tobacco, a different species from the tobacco in cigarettes today, contains several hallucinogens and five to ten times as much nicotine—enough, all told, to make it psychoactive.

Different nations had different numbers of sachems, but the inequality meant little because all decisions had to be unanimous; the Five Nations regarded consensus as a social ideal. As in all consensus-driven bodies, though, members felt intense pressure not to impede progress with frivolous objections.

Striking to the contemporary eye, the 117 codicils of the Great Law were concerned as much with establishing the limits on the great council’s powers as on granting them.

In creating such checks on authority, the league was just the most formal expression of a region-wide tradition.

The league was predicated, in short, on the consent of the governed, without which the entire enterprise would collapse.

But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent—the Haudenosaunee especially, but many others, too. (“Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty,” said colonist James Adair of the Ani Yun Wiya [Cherokee].) Important historically, these were the free people encountered by France and Britain—personifications of democratic self-government so vivid that some historians and activists have argued that the Great Law of Peace directly inspired the U.S. Constitution.

In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members—surrounded by examples of free life—always had the option to vote with their feet. It is likely that the first British villages in North America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that characterized European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture. That spirit alarmed and discomfited many Europeans, toff and peasant alike. But many others found it a deeply attractive vision of human possibility.

According to an influential essay Axtell published in 1981, the most important role Indians played in the evolution of the United States was as “military foes and cultural foes”—to be the “otherness” that colonists reacted against. “The whole colonial experience of trying to solve a related series of ‘Indian problems’ had much to do with giving the colonists an identity indissolubly linked to America,” he wrote. Collectively recoiling from the native population of the Americas, Europeans learned how to become a new version of themselves.

The reality turned out to be different. Instead of creating Winthrop’s vision of an ordered society, the Pilgrims actually invented the raucous, ultra-democratic New England town meeting—a system of governance, the Dartmouth historian Colin Calloway observes, that “displays more attributes of Algonkian government by consensus than of Puritan government by the divinely ordained.”