ACCLAIM FOR CHARLES C. MANN’S
1491
A Time Magazine • Boston Globe • Salon • San Jose Mercury News
Discover Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • USA Today
New York Sun • Times Literary Supplement • New York Times
Best Book of the Year
“A journalistic masterpiece: lively, engaging.… A wonderfully provocative and informative book.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Provocative.… A Jared Diamond–like volley that challenges prevailing thinking about global development. Mann has chronicled an important shift in our vision of world development, one our young children could end up studying in their textbooks when they reach junior high.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Engagingly written and utterly absorbing.… Exciting and entertaining.… Mann has produced a book that’s part detective story, part epic and part tragedy. He has taken on a vast topic: thousands of years, two huge continents and cultures that range from great urban complexes to small clusters of villages, a diversity so rich that our shorthand word for the people who inhabited the Americas—Indians—has never seemed more inadequate or inaccurate.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Marvelous.… A revelation.… Our concept of pure wilderness untouched by grubby human hands must now be jettisoned.”
—The New York Sun
“Mann does not present his thesis as an argument for unrestrained development. It is an argument, though, for human management of natural lands and against what he calls the ‘ecological nihilism’ of insisting that forests be wholly untouched.”
—The Seattle Times
“A must-read survey course of pre-Columbian history—current, meticulously researched, distilling volumes into single chapters to give general readers a broad view of the subject.”
—The Providence Journal
“Eminently evenhanded and engaging.… Mann’s colorful commentary sets the right tone: scholarly but hip.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Concise and brilliantly entertaining.… Reminiscent of John McPhee’s eloquence with scientific detail and Jared Diamond’s paradigm-shifting ambition.… Makes me think of history in a new way.”
—Jim Rossi, Los Angeles Times
“Engrossing.… Sift[s] adroitly through the accumulating evidence and the academic disputes. 1491 should be required reading in all high school and university world history courses.”
—Foreign Affairs
“An excellent bit of missionary work in relieving the general ignorance in the West about these once-great American cultures.… Mann has a facility for translating academese into laymen’s language and for writing about scientific complexities with a light hand.… There is, incidentally, nothing of political correctness in this book other than a recognition of the sensitivity of the issues.”
—Literary Review
“Monumental.… 1491 is less a self-contained work per se and more an induction ceremony into what, for many readers, promises to be a lifelong obsession with the startling new perspective slowly opening up on this prehistory. What’s most shocking about 1491 is the feeling it induces of waking up from a long dream and slowly realizing just how thoroughly one has been duped.… Mann slips in so many fresh, new interpretations of American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work.”
—Salon
“Well-researched and racily written.… Entertainingly readable, universally accessible.… There are few better introductory books on the civilizations of pre-Columbian America, and none so up-to-date”
—The Spectator
“[A] triumph.… A fascinating, unconventional account of Indian life in the Americas prior to 1492.”
—BusinessWeek
CHARLES C. MANN
1491
Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, and has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, and for HBO and Law & Order. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he is the recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His 1491 won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
www.charlesmann.org
ALSO BY CHARLES C. MANN
@ Large: The Strange Case of the World’s Biggest
Internet Invasion (1997)
(with David H. Freedman)
Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (1995)
(with Mark L. Plummer)
The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine and 100 Years of Rampant Competition (1993)
(with Mark L. Plummer)
The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (1987)
(with Robert P. Crease)
NATIVE AMERICA, 1491 A.D.
SECOND VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2011
Copyright © 2005, 2006, 2011 by Charles C. Mann
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005, and subsequently published in paperback in slightly different form in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this book have appeared in different forms in The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Design Magazine, Journal of the Southwest, The New York Times, and Science.
Insert credits (clockwise left to right): Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; Central Cahokia circa AD 1150–1200 (detail) by Lloyd K. Townsend courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site; photograph of chicha seller in Cuzco (detail), 1921, by Martín Chambi courtesy of Julia Chambi and Teo Allain Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi, Cusco, Peru; Community Life at Cahokia (detail) by Michael Hampshire courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site; Ruins in Machu Picchu © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; The Grolier Codex (detail), photograph © Justin Kerr; reed boat (detail) © Paul Harmon, Qala Yampu Project, www.reedboat.org; photograph of Inka ruin Wiñay Wayna (detail) by Martín Chambi courtesy of Julia Chambi and Teo Allain Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi, Cusco, Peru; Landrace maize from Oaxaca (detail) © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of smallpox (detail) from the Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, vol. 4, book 12, plate 114 by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún/Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
1491: new revelations of the Americas before Columbus /
Charles C. Mann.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Indians—Origin. 2. Indians—History. 3. Indians—Antiquities.
4. America—Antiquities.
I. Title.
E61.m266 2005
970.01′1—dc22 2004061547
eISBN: 978-0-307-27818-0
Author photograph © J.D. Sloan
Tip-in map © Charles C. Mann, Peter H. Dana, William E. Doolittle
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1_r1
For the woman in the next-door office—
Cloudlessly, like everything else
—CCM
CONTENTS
/> Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Map
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Maps
Preface
INTRODUCTION / Holmberg’s Mistake
1. A View from Above
PART ONE / Numbers from Nowhere?
2. Why Billington Survived
3. In the Land of Four Quarters
4. Frequently Asked Questions
PART TWO / Very Old Bones
5. Pleistocene Wars
6. Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)
7. Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II)
PART THREE / Landscape with Figures
8. Made in America
9. Amazonia
10. The Artificial Wilderness
CODA
11. The Great Law of Peace
Appendixes
A. Loaded Words
B. Talking Knots
C. The Syphilis Exception
D. Calendar Math
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Map Credits
Illustration Credits
MAPS
Native America, 1491 A.D.
1.1 Native America, 1000 A.D.
2.1 Massachusett Alliance, 1600 A.D.
2.2 Peoples of the Dawnland, 1600 A.D.
3.1 Tawantinsuyu: Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D.
3.2 Tawantinsuyu: Expansion of the Inka Empire, 1438–1527 A.D.
4.1 Triple Alliance, 1519 A.D.
5.1 Paleo-Indian Migration Routes: North America, 10,000 B.C.
6.1 Norte Chico: The Americas’ First Urban Complex, 3000–1800 B.C.
7.1 Mesoamerica, 1000 B.C.–1000 A.D.
7.2 Wari and Tiwanaku, 700 A.D.
8.1 Moundbuilders, 3400 B.C.–1400 A.D.
8.2 The American Bottom, 1300 A.D.
8.3 The Hundred Years’ War: Kaan and Mutal Battle to Control the Maya Heartland, 526–682 A.D.
9.1 Amazon Basin
PREFACE
The seeds of this book date back, at least in part, to 1983, when I wrote an article for Science about a NASA program that was monitoring atmospheric ozone levels. In the course of learning about the program, I flew with a research team in a NASA plane equipped to sample and analyze the atmosphere at thirty thousand feet. At one point the group landed in Mérida, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. For some reason the scientists had the next day off, and we all took a decrepit Volkswagen van to the Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá. I knew nothing about Mesoamerican culture—I may not even have been familiar with the term “Mesoamerica,” which encompasses the area from central Mexico to Panama, including all of Guatemala and Belize, and parts of El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, the homeland of the Maya, the Olmec, and a host of other indigenous groups. Moments after we clambered out of the van I was utterly enthralled.
On my own—sometimes for vacation, sometimes on assignment—I returned to Yucatán five or six times, three times with my friend Peter Menzel, a photojournalist. For a German magazine, Peter and I made a twelve-hour drive down a terrible dirt road (thigh-deep potholes, blockades of fallen timber) to the then-unexcavated Maya metropolis of Calakmul. Accompanying us was Juan de la Cruz Briceño, Maya himself, caretaker of another, smaller ruin. Juan had spent twenty years as a chiclero, trekking the forest for weeks on end in search of chicle trees, which have a gooey sap that Indians have dried and chewed for millennia and that in the late nineteenth century became the base of the chewing-gum industry. Around a night fire he told us about the ancient, vine-shrouded cities he had stumbled across in his rambles, and his amazement when scientists informed him that his ancestors had built them. That night we slept in hammocks amid tall, headstone-like carvings that had not been read for more than a thousand years.
My interest in the peoples who walked the Americas before Columbus only snapped into anything resembling focus in the fall of 1992. By chance one Sunday afternoon I came across a display in a college library of the special Columbian quincentenary issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Curious, I picked up the journal, sank into an armchair, and began to read an article by William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin. The article opened with the question, “What was the New World like at the time of Columbus?” Yes, I thought, what was it like? Who lived here and what could have passed through their minds when European sails first appeared on the horizon? I finished Denevan’s article and went on to others and didn’t stop reading until the librarian flicked the lights to signify closing time.
I didn’t know it then, but Denevan and a host of fellow researchers had spent their careers trying to answer these questions. The picture they have emerged with is quite different from what most Americans and Europeans think, and still little known outside specialist circles.
A year or two after I read Denevan’s article, I attended a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Called something like “New Perspectives on the Amazon,” the session featured William Balée of Tulane University. Balée’s talk was about “anthropogenic” forests—forests created by Indians centuries or millennia in the past—a concept I’d never heard of before. He also mentioned something that Denevan had discussed: many researchers now believe their predecessors underestimated the number of people in the Americas when Columbus arrived. Indians were more numerous than previously thought, Balée said—much more numerous. Gee, someone ought to put all this stuff together, I thought. It would make a fascinating book.
I kept waiting for that book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else appeared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself. Besides, I was curious to learn more. The book you are holding is the result.
Some things this book is not. It is not a systematic, chronological account of the Western Hemisphere’s cultural and social development before 1492. Such a book, its scope vast in space and time, could not be written—by the time the author approached the end, new findings would have been made and the beginning would be outdated. Among those who assured me of this were the very researchers who have spent much of the last few decades wrestling with the staggering diversity of pre-Columbian societies.
Nor is this book a full intellectual history of the recent changes in perspective among the anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologists, geographers, and historians who study the first Americans. That, too, would be impossible, for the ramifications of the new ideas are still rippling outward in too many directions for any writer to contain them in one single work.
Instead, this book explores what I believe to be the three main foci of the new findings: Indian demography (Part I), Indian origins (Part II), and Indian ecology (Part III). Because so many different societies illustrate these points in such different ways, I could not possibly be comprehensive. Instead, I chose my examples from cultures that are among the best documented, or have drawn the most recent attention, or just seemed the most intriguing.
Paradoxically, this book about life before Columbus spends more than a little time discussing life after Columbus. There are two reasons for this. First, many indigenous cultures had no writing, and so much of the best information about them comes from the chronicles of the first Europeans who saw them. Colonial accounts are distorted by cultural myopia, to be sure, but they are still eyewitness descriptions of other ways of life. Second, and equally important, the encounter between Europe and America was revelatory of both sides. In many cases, the stress of contact highlighted aspects of these societies that might not otherwise have been clearly seen. The meetings of the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims (the subject of Chapter 2) and the Inka and the Spanish force led by Fra
ncisco Pizarro (a major part of Chapter 3) both show how these native groups appeared to Europeans—and how they reacted when confronted by the unknown.
Throughout this book, as the reader already will have noticed, I use the term “Indian” to refer to the first inhabitants of the Americas. No question about it, Indian is a confusing and historically inappropriate name. Probably the most accurate descriptor for the original inhabitants of the Americas is Americans. Actually using it, though, would be risking worse confusion. In this book I try to refer to people by the names they call themselves. The overwhelming majority of the indigenous peoples whom I have met in both North and South America describe themselves as Indians. (For more about nomenclature, see Appendix A, “Loaded Words.”)
In the mid-1980s I traveled to the village of Hazelton, on the upper Skeena River in the middle of British Columbia. Many of its inhabitants belong to the Gitksan (or Gitxsan) nation. At the time of my visit, the Gitksan had just lodged a lawsuit with the governments of both British Columbia and Canada. They wanted the province and the nation to recognize that the Gitksan had lived there a long time, had never left, had never agreed to give their land away, and had thus retained legal title to about eleven thousand square miles of the province. They were very willing to negotiate, they said, but they were not willing to not be negotiated with.
Flying in, I could see why the Gitksan were attached to the area. The plane swept past the snowy, magnificent walls of the Rocher de Boule Mountains and into the confluence of two forested river valleys. Mist steamed off the land. People were fishing in the rivers for steelhead and salmon even though they were 165 miles from the coast.
The Gitanmaax band of the Gitksan has its headquarters in Hazelton, but most members live in a reserve just outside town. I drove to the reserve, where Neil Sterritt, head of the Gitanmaax council, explained the litigation to me. A straightforward, level-voiced man, he had got his start as a mining engineer and then come back home with his shirtsleeves rolled up, ready for a lengthy bout of legal wrangling. After multiple trials and appeals, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1997 that British Columbia had to negotiate the status of the land with the Gitksan. Talks were still ongoing in 2005, two decades after the lawsuit first began.