1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

That night we slept in hammocks amid tall, headstone-like carvings that had not been read for more than a thousand years.

This would be frigging awesome

In this book I try to refer to people by the names they call themselves. The overwhelming majority of the indigenous peoples whom I have met in both North and South America describe themselves as Indians.

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It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving.

In almost every case, each side believed itself to be superior—ethnocentrism seems to be a near-universal human quality—and from this belief was convinced that it could control the encounter to its advantage.

Across their facades ran enormous plates of polished gold. When the alpine sun filled Awkaypata, with its boldly delineated horizontal plain of white sand and sloping sheets of gold, the space became an amphitheater for the exaltation of light.

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It is possible that ethnic clashes would eventually have caused Tawantinsuyu to implode, Yugoslavia-style. But if Pizarro had not interrupted, the Inka might have created a monolithic culture as enduring as China.

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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.

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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.

All these numbers are at best rough approximations, but their implications are clear: 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.”

In the skeptics’ view, Dobyns, and other High Counters (as proponents of large pre-Columbian numbers have been called) are like people who discover an empty bank account and claim from its very emptiness that it once contained millions of dollars. Historians who project large Indian populations, Low Counter critics say, are committing the intellectual sin of arguing from silence.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since.

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Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

Absent the extinctions, the encounter between Europe and the Americas might have been equally deadly for both sides—a world in which both hemispheres experienced catastrophic depopulation.

The word stupidaggine (an absurdity), similar enough in Italian and Spanish, rang out in the room, drawing stares. The engineer seemed not to care. He looked positively offended at the Olmec failure to see the world in the same way as a contemporary European engineer.

Haha

The corollary is that widespread and open trade in ideas is the best way to make up for the lacunae.

In the 1930s, Sylvanus G. Morley of Harvard, probably the most celebrated Mayanist of his day, espoused what is still the best-known theory: The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.

hickory milk

Despite the unsanitary presentation, the milk was ambrosial—fragrantly nutty, delightfully heavy on the tongue, unlike anything I had encountered before.

They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.