1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers.

Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious.

It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.

In other words, the Americas were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined.

The Neolithic Revolution is the invention of farming, an event whose significance can hardly be overstated.

Researchers have long known that a second, independent Neolithic Revolution occurred in Mesoamerica.

Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation.

“When you look at the historical record, it’s clear that Indians were trying to control their own destinies,” Salisbury said. “And often enough they succeeded”—only to learn, as all peoples do, that the consequences were not what they expected.

If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?

Five centuries later the wholesale reshuffling of populations became an infamous trademark of Stalin and Mao. But the scale on which the Inka moved the pieces around the ethnic checkerboard would have excited their admiration.

To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this pattern occurred again and again in the Americas.

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

If Pizarro had been amazed by the size of Tawantinsuyu after the terrible epidemic and war, how many people had been living there to begin with?

Taken as a whole, Dobyns thought, the epidemics must have killed nine out of ten of the inhabitants of Tawantinsuyu.

Smallpox was recorded to have appeared on the island of Hispaniola in November or December 1518. It killed a third of the native population before jumping to Puerto Rico and Cuba.

The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.

As a result, Dobyns said, all colonial population estimates were too low.

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.

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.

If Dobyns was right, disease claimed the lives of 80 to 100 million Indians by the first third of the seventeenth century.

the epidemics killed about one out of every five people on earth.

Few researchers today accept Dobyns’s estimates—they seem extreme—but most believe that native numbers were far higher than estimated by previous generations.

“It’s perfectly acceptable to move into unoccupied land,” Stiffarm told me. “And land with only a few ‘savages’ is the next best thing.”

For four years his force wandered through what are now Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, looking for gold and wrecking most everything it touched.

Along the way, though, he managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing he did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—he brought pigs.

Pigs were as essential to the conquistadors as horses.

Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in constant contact with many animals.

few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk.

Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest.

“That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out.”

Not only do archaeologists like Dobyns, Perttula, and Ramenofsky argue that unrecorded pandemics swept through the Americas, they claim that the diseases themselves were of unprecedented deadliness.

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.

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

The tally cannot be taken as exact, but the fact remains: a single epidemic killed more than three of every four indigenous Siberians in that area.

A second reason historians believe that epidemics tore through Native American communities before Europeans arrived is that epidemics also did it after Europeans arrived.

Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine.

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.”

Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust.

Disease not only shattered the family bonds that were the underlying foundation of Indian societies, it wiped out the political superstructure at the top.

The “lies” were the inconvenient fact that the Mexica past was one of poverty and humiliation.

Human sacrifice is such a charged subject that its practice by the Triple Alliance has inevitably become shrouded in myths.

In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings.

Contemplating mortality, thinkers in many cultures have drawn solace from the prospect of life after death.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind.

Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-reliefs, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic system based on an ovoid shape that has no name in European languages.

Their interest helped a new generation of indigenous artists to explore new themes.

Now envision this kind of fertile back-and-forth happening in a hundred ways with a hundred cultures—the gifts from four centuries of intellectual exchange.

Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished when smallpox came ashore.