1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

About a century before our imaginary surveillance tour, though, the Maya heartland entered a kind of Dark Ages. Many of the greatest cities emptied, as did much of the countryside around them. Incredibly, some of the last inscriptions are gibberish, as if scribes had lost the knowledge of writing and were reduced to meaningless imitation of their ancestors.

the Western Hemisphere before 1492. It was, in the current view, a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a region where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed.

The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to New England.

The Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?

By 1610 Britain alone had about two hundred vessels operating off Newfoundland and New England; hundreds more came from France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. With striking uniformity, these travelers reported that New England was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain, the famous explorer, visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there.

From southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty—“utterly void,” Dermer reported. What had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries. Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Slowly Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum’s entire social world had vanished.

he led Dermer on a melancholy march inland. The settlements they passed lay empty to the sky but full of untended dead. Tisquantum’s party finally encountered some survivors, a handful of families in a shattered village.

the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis,

The Indians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” the merchant Thomas Morton observed. In their panic, the healthy fled from the sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind them remained the dying, “left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon.” Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England.

Until the sickness Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand and held sway over a confederation of as many as twenty thousand. Now his group was reduced to sixty people and the entire confederation to fewer than a thousand. The Wampanoag, wrote Salisbury, the Smith historian, came to the obvious logical conclusion: “their deities had allied against them.”

more than fifty of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease.

The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism.

Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation.

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.

Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400.

Asserting that De Soto’s visit caused the subsequent collapse of the Caddo and Coosa may be only the old logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The Indians in De Soto’s path, if researchers are correct, endured losses that were anomalously greater. How could this be true? the skeptics ask.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, scientists say.

Given these convincing rebuttals, why have the majority of researchers nonetheless become High Counters?

In August 1967 a missionary’s two-year-old daughter came down with measles in a village on the Toototobi River in Brazil, near the border with Venezuela.

the affected villages had a mean death rate of 8.8 percent.

The implication, implausible at first glance, was that Indians in their virgin-soil state were more vulnerable to European diseases than virgin-soil Europeans would have been.

In addition to having no acquired immunity (the first kind of vulnerability), the inhabitants of the Americas had immune systems that some researchers believe were much more restricted than European immune systems.

Genetic homogeneity

Most human groups are a scattershot mix of HLA profiles, which means that almost always some people in the group will not get sick when exposed to a particular pathogen.

European populations have at least thirty-five main HLA classes, whereas Indian groups have no more than seventeen.

As a result, Black argued, “people of the New World are unusually susceptible to diseases of the Old.”*

“But I don’t see how it [waves of epidemics from European diseases] could have been prevented for very long. That’s a terrible thought. But I’ve been working with highly contagious diseases for forty years, and I can tell you that in the long run it is almost impossible to keep them out.”*

Valencia’s plan was conversion by proxy: he and the rest of the twelve would open the eyes of the Indian priesthood to the beauties of the true faith, gaining their adherence by reasoned theological discussion, and then the priests would fan out and spread the Gospel in their native tongue.

In the end the friars resorted to a crude but effective argument: the Indians had to pledge fealty to the Christian god, because their own “gods were not powerful enough to liberate them from the hands of the Spaniards.” In a sober ceremony, the Mexica abjured their old religion and embraced Christianity.

Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V. A. C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At the time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire.

In their penchant for ceremonial public slaughter, the Alliance and Europe were more alike than either side grasped. In both places the public death was accompanied by the reading of ritual scripts. And in both the goal was to create a cathartic paroxysm of loyalty to the government—in

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. “From whence come the flowers [the artistic creations] that enrapture man?” asks the poet. “The songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs?” And he answers: “Only from His [that is, Ometeotl’s] home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven.” Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.

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.

Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia. Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia. Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished when smallpox came ashore.

Berkeley researchers Cook and Borah spent decades reconstructing the population of the former Triple Alliance realm in the wake of the Spanish conquest. By combining colonial-era data from many sources, the two men estimated that the number of people in the region fell from 25.2 million in 1518, just before Cortés arrived, to about 700,000 in 1623—a 97 percent drop in little more than a century.

In Las Casas’s “sure, truthful estimate,” his countrymen in the first five decades after Columbus wiped out “more than twelve million souls, men and women and children; and in truth I believe, without trying to deceive myself, that it was more than fifteen million.”

What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years.

If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.

One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.

What is certain is that the Chinchorro mummies are the first known manifestation of a phenomenon that marked Andean society all the way up to the Inka: the belief that the venerated, preserved dead could exert a powerful impact on the living.

conduct some radiocarbon tests on samples from Caral. The tests amply confirmed the city’s antiquity: it was founded before 2600 B.C.

Indians took the first steps toward modern maize in southern Mexico, probably in the highlands, more than six thousand years ago. Both argue that modern maize was the outcome of a bold act of conscious biological manipulation—“arguably man’s first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering,”

A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume).

Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary.

In the Oaxacan countryside, they explained to me, a house without maize growing in the backyard is like a house without a roof or walls. You would never not have maize, they said. They were speaking matter-of-factly, as if telling me how to take the bus. Even in the city, they said, where people cannot grow maize, nobody would even think of passing a day without eating it. Curious, I asked what they thought would happen if they didn’t have maize every day. Díaz Castellano looked at me as if I had asked the stupidest question in the world. “Why should I want to be somebody else?” he said.

Stirling’s stela in Tres Zapotes bore a Long Count date of 7.16.6.16.18. The implication is that by 32 B.C. the Olmec already had all three calendars and zero to boot. One can’t be sure, because the date does not include a zero or a reference to the other calendars. But it is hard to imagine how one could have a Long Count without them. Tentatively, therefore, archaeologists assign the invention of zero to sometime before 32 B.C., centuries ahead of its invention in India.

The only thing more mysterious than failing to invent the wheel would be inventing the wheel and then failing to use it. But that is exactly what the Indians did. Presumably countless thousands of people rolled the toylike figurines back and forth. How could none of them have thought of making their wheels bigger and more useful?

The Genius of China, a history of Chinese science and technology published in 1998.