Peak primitivism, vanished high culture

“1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus” is an interesting book by Charles C Mann. It's written in a “journalistic” style, and is therefore suited for the general reader. I have to admit, though, that I found the book somewhat confusing, since the author jumps back and forth between different countries and time-periods. Mann is also very “politically correct”, sometimes to the point of being infuriating. Still, if you can sift through this material, it might forever change the way you look at pre-Columbian America and its inhabitants.

Mann argues that America wasn't a pristine wilderness before the arrival of the European colonialists. Quite the contrary, the Indians had learned to manage their natural environment on a relatively massive scale. In the Amazonas, about a quarter of the vast rainforest was managed by man. The Indians lived in large settlements resembling towns, had cut out passage ways for boats through the thick vegetation surrounding the rivers, and planted innumerable orchards. The Yanomami and other “Stone Age” tribes in the Amazon region are remnants of a more advanced culture. The North American “wilderness” was also managed by Indian peoples, often by deliberately starting fires. In many places, the “wild” resembled parkland! The number of game animals was kept down by constant hunting. Only after the arrival of the Europeans and the collapse of the Indian population did the wilderness become seemingly “pristine”, with dense forests and unnaturally large flocks of bison, elk and passenger pigeon. This was the wilderness Thoreau, Muir and Teddy Roosevelt sought to protect at a later date. This has obvious implications for the environmentalist movement, not to mention Deep Ecologists. If North American nature haven't been properly “wild” or “pristine” for centuries, maybe millennia, what exactly are we supposed to be defending?

Mann also attacks the idea that the Indians were some kind of “peoples without history”, suspended in an Eternal Now, either as evil barbarians or as noble savages. On this point, I think he is less controversial (at least among scholars – the Hollywood film industry might be something else again). Mann devotes several chapters to mapping the pre-contact history of Mexico, Central America, Peru and Bolivia. In these regions, obvious high cultures arose, with temples, towns, public work projects, armies and advanced astronomy. The Aztecs, the Maya and the Inca are well known, but Mann also discusses the Olmecs, Teotihuacan, Tiwanaku and several lesser known pre-Inca cultures in Peru. The Norte Chico culture (which was largely peaceful) may be as old as Sumer! Surprisingly, he says relatively little about the mysterious Nazca lines.

If the Native cultures and civilizations of the Americas were more advanced than previously assumed, their downfall must also have been more spectacular and tragic. The main reason for the disaster was smallpox, a disease to which many Europeans were immune. Together with other European diseases, smallpox eradicated millions of Natives, leading to a demographic collapse. Smallpox seems to have reached the Inca Empire even before the conquistadors, somehow transmitted there from Mexico (where the Spanish had already landed). Mann doesn't believe that the Spanish had real superiority in weapons during the 16th century – the Incas should have been able to defeat them, certainly in the mountainous terrain of Peru. Also, the initial Spanish forces were relatively small in both Mexico and Peru. The conquest became possible due to disease and depopulation, combined with the fact that some Native factions collaborated with the Spanish in both Mexico and Peru. Cortes in Mexico could mobilize thousands of non-Aztec Indians dissatisfied with being Aztec subjects, and in Peru, Pizarro won the support of dissident aristocratic groups during a civil war. Thus, the Natives weren't particularly naïve or stupid if the entire context is taken into consideration.

In a final chapter, Mann goes further than most scholars would allow, arguing that the North American Indians may have influenced the Enlightenment philosophers and even the framers of the U.S. Constitution. He discusses the Iroquois Confederation in this context.

As already indicated, I don't really like the style of this book, but it does contain so much valuable information that I eventually give it four stars.