Book of the Month: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

The November book of the month is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann.

This book seems to be timed appropriately for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. We shall see what everyone thinks about Columbus and the New World after reading what science has to say about the way life was way back then.

Click the link to get your copy of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

Expect a rousing discussion about this book in the end of November!

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Comment

Comment by Bert Latamore on December 6, 2009 at 12:31pm

Obviously if 1491 is anywhere near correct, then the greatest mass tragedy in human existence took place on the American continents. The unfortunate thing is that it was inevitable. Sooner or later America would be "discovered" by the Eurasians. We know that the Vikings had a colony on the Atlantic coast of what is now Canada in the dark ages, and there is some evidence pointing to at least one and possibly more independent explorations of bits of North America by Europeans between then and 1492, but none of those were sustained. However, ship technology, navigation, and other relevant technologies were moving forward steadily in Europe.
Certainly the European settlers were very racist and treated the natives very badly. But if 1491 is anywhere near correct, then the vast majority of the loss of life was caused by disease. The American aboriginals had been isolated from waves of diseases that had traveled around Europe and Asia. Remember that in the 1300s for instance the Black Plague wiped out between half and two-thirds of the population of Europe, which probably is one reason that the Europeans did not create and maintain North American settlements earlier. The population of Europe needed a couple of centuries to recover. So all these diseases arrived in the "New World" at once. It was a terrible tragedy.
I think the question for us is what we do about this now in terms of true equality for aboriginal peoples in the Americas.

Comment by Richard Baker on December 6, 2009 at 2:54am

I've now reached Part Two and I'm finding it a very engaging mixture of history and science, if somewhat grim in its subject matter. Every chapter so far has made me want to read entire books on its topic!

Regarding pre-contact demography, I'm quite surprised that there hasn't been very much so far about data from archaeology. I know there's been a lot of work done estimating the population densities and agricultural productivities of the major Maya cities, so surely there must have been at least some similar work done on the Mexica, Inka, the North American civilisations and so forth. Almost all the discussion of demography in the parts of the book I've read has been about extrapolating pre-contact populations from post-contact populations and mortality rates of epidemics but there must surely be several other lines of evidence that could support or contradict the conclusions of these arguments.

Comment by Bert Latamore on November 23, 2009 at 2:41pm

I read this (as an ebook from eReader.com) last month, actually, and found it very interesting. It presents a rather startling argument for what, if true, must be the largest tragedy in human evolution. And there is evidence to back it up. For instance, if we look at what Lewis and Clark found when they traveled to the West Coast and back and then at the native populations 30 or so years later we see a major drop off. Similarly we know that the population of the Aztec Empire fell dramatically due mostly to European diseases within a decade of their first contact with the Spanish. And the native population of New England also fell dramatically in the decades after their contact with the British. The frightening thing is that this book could have it right, at least in the broad brush.

Comment by PaulaT on November 3, 2009 at 11:04pm

Is the full year's book list posted here somewhere? I want to put any books I do not already have on my Christmas wish list. :-)

Comment by davezawislak on November 3, 2009 at 11:18am

This was sitting in my to read pile, after reading 1421.

Comment by Dave Cole on October 27, 2009 at 3:22pm

Waiting for the book to arrive, lets see how good surface mail is.