Much of our U.S. History textbooks start with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. They don’t really discuss the Native Americans’ cultures and way of life, aside from mentioning briefly the fact that they were colonized and subsequently disintegrated in what we call today a genocide. Most Western scholars have chosen to ignore their achievements, which is why the majority of Americans picture the pre-Columbian Americas as a virgin landmass, one that is practically unaffected by humans. It also doesn’t help that a considerable large amount of American schools teach that Native Americans “lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly wilderness" (Mann 4).
Journalist Charles C. Mann, in his book 1491, argues that the aforementioned beliefs were inaccurate. In the pre-Columbian Americas, life was far more advanced than is generally believed. To guide the readers as they read, Mann provides three main focuses in his book: (1) Indian origins; (2) Indian demography; and (3) Indian ecology. These three main focuses will challenge the ideas that most Americans—even scholars—previously believed on Native Americans—that they came from the Bering Strait 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, and that they came in small numbers and had little impact in their environment.
In the second section of the book, Very Old Bones, Mann discusses the origins of the Indians—when, where, and how they may have come to the Americas. There are several theories that he wrote in the book by interviewing several scholars because Mann always gives both sides of a scholarly dispute. However, he is not shy about revealing which side he favors.
The aforementioned is particularly true with his treatment of New World origins. In the book, he briefly discusses The Lost Tribe theory or the Indians-as-Jews theory. However, this theory is false because Indians weren’t circumcised and further research based on scientific discovery found by British scientists has also proven it wrong. From this theory, many other theories then emerge to answer the question of Indian origins. One of them is the Clovis theory. This theory is championed by archeologist C. Vance Haynes from University of Arizona, who has long believed the idea that the first Americans were the Clovis people, who arrived in the Americas via the Bering Strait roughly 12,000 years ago (176). However, a new archeological evidence shows that they were not the first humans to set foot in the Americas. The new evidence was found in Monte Verde, a Chilean riverbank that was excavated by Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky, Mario Pino of the University of Chile, and a team of students and specialists. They found “… that paleo-Indians had occupied Monte Verde at least 12,800 years ago” (190). They also found human habitations that roughly dated from 32,000 years ago. Therefore, it can be concluded that Indians must have arrived in the Americas thousands of years before that if Monte Verde was at least 12,800 years old. To refute the Clovis theory even more, back in 2008 and 2009, archeologists at the University of Oregon found fossilized human excrement and a scraping tool that was older than Clovis in a cave just two hundred miles from the Pacific Coast (195). With these many pieces of evidence, we can conclude that the first peopling of the Americas was not a singular event like the Clovis theory would have us believe.
In Numbers from Nowhere, Mann examines the size of the Indian population in the Americas before 1492. The Americas, in Mann’s words, was “a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture” (31) where one-fifth of the world’s people lived. The Indians were thoroughly erased by the Europeans because of diseases as well as their brutality. At that time, Indians weren’t immune to smallpox. Since most Europeans contracted smallpox in childhood, they become immune to it. However, Indians have never been exposed to it at all. Since smallpox is contagious and spreads through person-to-person, it was deadly for them. Take the Inca empire as an example. Smallpox in the empire was so severe that more than 200,000 people died of it since it spread to all parts of the kingdom (99). The smallpox plague killed the ruler of Inca at the time, Wayna Qhapac, as well as his elder son and successor. With no clear rules of succession, a civil war soon erupted to determine the next ruler, in which Atahualpa emerged victoriously. Smallpox-induced civil wars were why the mighty Inca empire fell to the Spanish. When Francisco Pizarro and his forces arrived, what they saw was a relatively intact empire. This led Atahualpa to be captured and killed, which ultimately caused the fall of the Inca empire. Pizarro himself admitted that “… it would have been impossible for [them] to win [the conquest] …” had Wayna Qhapac been alive. Furthermore, he added that “… had the land not been divided by the [smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win the land” (104). Without the spread of smallpox, the post-contact history of the Americas would have been definitely different.
Aside from smallpox, the pigs that the Spanish brought with them were also another main reason why Indian population fell. To the Spanish, pigs were as essential as horses. When they traveled, the pigs passed on diseases that constantly mutated between animals and people (112). Because of this, the Caddoan population that lived on the modern Texas-Arkansas border dropped 200,000 to 8,500 due to Hernando de Soto’s expedition (112). The estimated total death count of the European disease and brutality was 40 million—as estimated by Spanish colonist and historian Bartolome de Las Casas. Therefore, we can now refute the belief that the population of pre-contact Americas was small. It was actually the opposite.
The third and final major theme of Mann’s book is about “humanized landscapes” in the Americas in 1491 and before. In this section, he refutes the general belief that the Americas was a virgin landmass, one that was unaffected by the Indians. Mann discusses Indian burning in the first section of the book, A View from Above. Indians that lived in the Beni, a Bolivian province, maintained and expanded the grasslands by setting huge areas on fire. This burning “… created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species depended on indigenous pyrophilia” (5). Indian burning, as opposed to being harmful, helped open up the forest and expand grasslands and tropical savannas. There is also earthworks or geoglyphs that occur throughout the Americas, a few of them found by archaeologists Clark Erickson and William Balee of the University of Pennsylvania in the same region of the Beni. Erickson believes that “… before Columbus an 800- or 1000-mile swath of western Amazonia was occupied by a previously unknown mix of cultures that radically reshaped the landscape around them” (6). He was right because Indians had converted a quarter of the vast Amazon forest into farms and agricultural forests. They also converted the once-forested Andes to grass and brush for their animal populations and maize fields (369). Once again, Mann has refuted another previously-believed Indian belief: that America was an untouched wilderness before the colonists arrived.
1491 is an impressive book. It is definitely what our textbooks should have looked like because the book approaches pre-Columbian history from the perspective of the indigenous people rather than the Eurocentric approach taken by most textbook writers and scholars. This Eurocentric approach is why today’s society overlook a huge part of our history. The death of one-fifth of the world’s people was a huge loss to our history. This is why we have to be aware of their history because we don’t want to repeat the same mistake that Holmberg made. These people were advanced and they had a real history. I believe this book is a work that every American student should read as part of their curriculum. In this Eurocentric-society, we must learn to take off the Eurocentric lenses and see from indigenous lenses instead.