Review: 1491

Once again, Valpo Public has come through with an excellent book purchase for me to waste time with. Charles C. Mann’s very readable 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus describes some current controversy over what the Americas looked like prior to Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean.

Charles Mann wrote a very interesting article for The Atlantic in 2002 based on the book. The article, also entitled “1491“, covers some of the major points of his book. An interview of the same period (“The Pristine Myth“) is only available online and not available in the print version.

(Like all Atlantic articles, you must be a subscriber to see it all online. But why are you not a subscriber to The Atlantic Monthly? It’s hands-down the best magazine out there. But the article is also available at The UWMilwaukee Idea.)

The traditional way to view the American Indians prior to Columbus is that there were a couple of largish civilizations in Central and South America (Mayans, Aztec and Inkan) but they were superstitious, evil societies that by and large had little impact on the environment. Certainly the land of North America was little populated, a wild sanctuary with almost no one in it, a pristine environment destroyed by the settlers.

It’s a great story except, as Mann points out, it’s almost entirely untrue.

It turns out the Americas had fairly large populations. Even if the large numbers are incorrect, it’s hard to discount the stories of the first Europeans, who declared that the land was so full of healthy people that they could not take it. The next to visit said that they land was so full of skulls that it looked like a modern Golgotha.

These people weren’t the feral man who had no impact on the environment that the environmentalists like to portray. They actively managed the land, even in North America, using primarily fire. The giant herds of bison seen in the Old West of America weren’t there when the first explorers of the Mississippi came through but were there in droves later. Same for the passenger pigeon. The explosions of these populations (herds of bison on the plains able to be seen from outer space) were the result of removing the species that had controlled them: Homo Sapiens.

This isn’t a “the Indians were in tune with nature so let’s be like them and live in wigwams” garbage talk that comes out of so many environmentalists. The Indians managed their land like every human group before them and managed it well. Mann makes a very persuasive argument that “slash & burn” as practiced in the Amazon is the result not of ancient practices but of the modern metal axe and the destruction of Indian civilisations by disease, war and extermination campaigns. Jane Jacobs makes a similar argument about these “primitive man” groups. She argued that they must be the result of the fall of a great civilisation, that our progress doesn’t happen outside of “cities”. She would be happy with Mann’s treatment, I think, because it vindicates much of her ideas.

The Indians did more than just give us maize (corn in the US), tomatoes, potatoes, and tortilla-based meals. Maize alone would have been a remarkable achievement in the history of mankind, a foodstuff that seems to have no ancestor, or at least no surviving ancestor. (Yes, I know the teostine argument. But since maize is so promiscuous, it’s unlikely that an ancestor would survive the rise of the “engineered” strands with larger, non-exploding fruit.) They may have created innovations that can still be useful today, such as the use of charcoal in soil treatments. When used along with fertilizer (guano?), test fields had yields 875% greater than untreated Amazonian soil, and more than double fertilizer alone. And it remains good soil. Some Andean fields have been farmed since the times of Sumer.

The idea that the Indians were effective managers of the Americas (more or less: they did some idiot things, too) seems to offend everyone, which means that it’s probably correct. Conservatives balk because it seems like yet another politically correct “let’s hate the white guys” move to claim that up to 95% of the Indians died of European diseases and the collapse that followed. Environmentalists hate the thought that the Indians weren’t mindless idiots who lived like deer in the environment but humans who manipulated their world to create an Amazon that supported thousands in a single “city”.

The ideas are controversial but certainly worth looking at. That the first Americans came much longer than 13,000 years ago, long before the infamous “land bridge” between Russia and Alaska, is now quite well established. That the Mississippian cultures had large settlements is also clear from the initial accounts. Some of the ranges, of course, are ridiculously large (Did 60 or 95% of the Indians die of disease? Were there 1M or 500,000 in this area?) and will probably never be refined. But that the Indians developed great cultures in spite of having no beasts of burden, domesticable large animals for food, or easily domesticated grains is impressive. The idea that they probably had the world’s largest civilisation thousands of years ago in the middle of an area that gets no rainfall is even more amazing.

It’s not about keeping the land pristine, something that probably makes no sense even if no one lived here before the Europeans came. Rather, Mann makes the point for intelligent management of the land, the development of an ecosystem that supports man fully and sustainably.

Worth reading.

Elsewhere

• The Seattle Times reviews 1491
• Business Week reviews 1491, giving it 4 of 5 stars.
• TIME interviews Mann.
• The article “1491” at The Atlantic
• The article reprint over at UWMilwaukee
• “The Pristine Myth“, a 2002 Atlantic interview with Mann.
• The LA Times review, “Germs wiped out much of America“, over at the Sun-Sentinel