1491 is a summary of recent changes in (scholarly) understanding of the peoples in the Americas immediately before Columbus. Part I argues that there were many more people here than you think. Part II argues that they got here much earlier than you think. Part III argues that they had a much larger impact on the environment than you think.
The new understanding of the Americas is really cool. I just wish that the book had been written by one of the scientists, instead of a professional popular science writer. It is obvious to me, from reading it, that the author is not and never has been a scientist.
Prerequisites: Pre-Columbian history as taught by grade schools in the US. So very little.
Originally Written: September 2020.
Confidence Level: Not my ideas.
Criticism
I’ll start with the stuff I didn’t like, and end with the stuff that I did. Most of the criticism centers on Ch. 4: Frequently Asked Questions. All emphasis is mine.
Cell Walls
An inconsequential, but terrible error. When describing human immune response:
Like minute scouts inspecting potential battle zones, leukocytes constantly scan cell walls for little bits of stuff … that doesn’t belong.
p. 117
Animal cells don’t have cell walls. Plant cells do. That’s middle school science.
Other History
Although Mann has talked with many experts in the history of the Americas, his knowledge of history elsewhere is lacking. Here are a few of those claims that I either recognized immediately as false or I was suspicious of and looked for alternative sources:
- The milpa, a field of corn, beans, squash, etc planted together, is the only farming system where the same field can be cultivated for thousands of years. [p. 226]
Mann doesn’t provide evidence that any particular field has been cultivated for this long. Wet rice & carp seems like a better candidate for longest cultivated field.
- The concept of zero, that nothingness is a number, confused Europe until the Renaissance. [p. 245]
At the very latest, this idea became common in Europe when Fibonacci introduced Arabic numerals to Europe in 1202.
- The moldboard plow wasn’t used in Europe until the Enlightenment. [p. 254]
We have records of it in Britain by the 600s. As evidence for this claim, Mann cites an author whose most well-known book is about ancient aliens in West Africa.
Religion
Mann doesn’t understand religious people. Although he recognizes the social roles of religion, he seems to have a hard time accepting that people actually believe their own religion. Some examples:
- During a debate between 12 Catholic monks and 12 Mexica (Aztec) priests:
‘What more, immediately, will we say?’ the lead [Mexica] cleric asks. ‘We are those who shelter the people, / We are mothers to the people, fathers to the people.’ Translation: We priests are in the same business as you Franciscans. We are high-ranking clerics, elite intellectuals, just like you. And just like you, we have a function: providing comfort and meaning to the common folk.
p. 129
That is not the purpose of a Catholic priest. The purpose of a priest is not to improve society and comfort people here on Earth. It’s to keep people from BURNING IN HELL FOR ETERNITY. Improving society is secondary. I know very little about the Mexica religion, but I guess that the 12 most prominent defenders really believed in it. They probably thought of their role in cosmic terms, not in terms of the temporal services they provide to the common folk.
- When discussing Mexica human sacrifice, Mann claims that Europe had more public executions per capita than the Aztecs.[1]Does anyone know if this claim is legitimate? He’s merging sources, so I’m not sure. He then says that they probably stem from similar causes:
In their penchant for public slaughter, the Alliance and Europe were more alike than either side grasped. … And in both the goal was to create a cathartic paroxysm of loyalty to the government.
p. 137
Mann, don’t you remember, how, on the previous page, you described, that Mexica religion teaches people, that without human sacrifice, THE SUN WOULD LITERALLY GO OUT?[2]Yes, this is supposed to sound exasperated at Mann. That was probably a more important goal for the people doing the sacrifices.
- Mann doesn’t just think that ancient people don’t really believe their own religions, modern people don’t either. When noting that Catholics debated whether the destruction they wrought was worth the conversions:
‘Christianity is not about getting healthy, it’s about getting saved,’ Crease said summarizing. Today few Christians would endorse this argument.
p. 149
Christianity is still about getting saved. Health is nice and something that you should support, but it is not as important as salvation. If you are causing destruction while trying to save people, you should stop and consider your own salvation first. If your behavior is so terrible that you need to doubt your own salvation, can you really be bringing salvation to other people? Cleanse the inner vessel first.
Empirical and Ethical Claims
Mann could be much clearer about distinguishing between ethical claims and technical claims. I’m comparing this to other popular science books, written by scientists. Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate by Lovejoy (2019) refuses to talk about whether humans caused climate change until the last chapter. By this point, he has explained enough climate science to fully explain his argument. The Future of Fusion Energy by Parisi & Ball (2019) has ethical claims much more central to its argument: We should pursue fusion to avoid the problems with fossil fuels, nuclear proliferation, and intermittency / land use of wind & solar. And here’s how we can do it. But I think that every sentence is clear on whether it’s making a ethical claim or a technical claim. Mann regularly blends the two kinds of arguments.
He is willing to apply moral judgment on historical Europeans (who definitely deserve it), but not on Indians. This is especially ironic because one of his main points is that we should treat Indians as agents, not part of the landscape.
For some reason, Mann decides to devote a footnote to emphasizing that the Indians are not inferior in a Darwinian sense. [p. 119] This is absurd. In a Darwinian sense, the group where 95% of the people die is inferior to the group which survives, by definition. The correct response to someone saying this is to remind them that Darwinism is a terrible thing to base ethics on. We shouldn’t even use ethical terms like ‘inferior’ or ‘superior’ in this context. The value of a human life is not determined by their immune system.
Uncertainty
Mann doesn’t think about uncertainty properly. The error is most obvious from:
Scientists usually report $C^{14}$ dates with their potential error, as in 3000 $\pm$ 150 B.P. (1050 $\pm$ 150 B.C.). To avoid typographical clutter, I do not include the error spread, believing that readers understand the unavoidable uncertainties in measuring minute levels of residual radioactivity.
p. 177
The point of the error bars is not to remind you that error exists – it’s to tell you how much error there is. Mann’s way of thinking about uncertainty don’t seem to be quantified.
Mann includes detailed narratives about many regions of the Americans. Uncertainties in these narratives are relegated to the endnotes, which are not even referenced in the text itself. The superscript numbers might disrupt the story, so instead, endnotes are referenced by page numbers.
He is overconfident about his narratives and refuses to say anything about uncertain numbers.
How Many People?
The biggest problem I have with the book is one of omission which stems from not understanding uncertainty. I don’t know how many people lived in the Americas in 1491. Mann’s response to this question is: more than you think. This is not an answer.
There are two instances where a pre-European population estimate is given. In one, Mann quotes Henige:
‘perhaps 40 million throughout the Western Hemisphere’ is a ‘not unreasonable’ figure – putting him at the low end of the High Counters, but a High Counter nonetheless.
p. 151
Since Mann is definitely on the side of the High Counters, he presumably thinks that there were at least 40 million people in the Americas in 1491.
The second is a figure copied from Cook and Borah which estimates how the population of Central Mexico changed from 1518 to 1623. [p. 147] The numbers start at 25,000,000 (and end at 700,000). There are no error bars on the graph or alternative estimates from other scholars.
There is no effort to connect these two numbers. Was over half the population of the hemisphere in Central Mexico?
I understand that there is huge uncertainty. But the appropriate response is not silence. Mann should have taken two estimates of the population of the Americas, a typical Low Counter and a typical High Counter, and walked us through their calculations. We would then have a much better understanding of the debate – and why Mann thinks the High Counters are right. We would not only have an estimate for what the number is, we would also learn large scale demographic patterns, and where people disagree. Is the dispute mainly because the High Counters think that the cities of Mexico and the Andes were significantly larger? Or is it because the Low Counters completely miss significant civilizations in the Amazon and Southeast US?
In the place where I would have put these estimates, Mann has (admittedly excellent) excerpts of Mexica poetry. It does make me wonder if Mann would be more upset by the loss of a literary tradition or the loss of an additional 10,000,000 people.
Praise
One of the things I like best is that Mann is a good storyteller. His stories of the histories of the Americas are engaging. So, with the caveat above that I’m not con dent on the accuracy of the details, I’ll summarize a few of the ones I found most interesting: New England, the Southeast United States, Norte Chico (in Peru), and the Amazon.
New England
Chapter 2
European trade with New England started in the early 1500s. It was already densely populated, and any Europeans who tried to stay there would be ‘encouraged’ to leave after a few weeks or months. In the inland river valleys, there were towns fed by maize agriculture. Along the coast was a continually shifting network of small villages and individual households that farmed as a supplement to the abundant seafood.
The Wampanoag were a confederation of these coastal communities. Sometimes, Europeans would abduct Indians, which eventually led to the Wampanoag attacking any Europeans on sight.
The man who would later introduce himself to the Pilgrims as ‘Divine Wrath’ (Tesquantum $\rightarrow$ Squanto) was one of the people taken and sold into slavery in Spain. He spent the next 5 years in Europe (Spain & England), where he became fluent in English and learned how to plant fish with crops. He returned to New England less than a year before the Pilgrims arrived.
In the meantime, smallpox had hit New England. It decimated the population of the Wampanoag and their allies – but not their enemies, who they had little contact with.
When the Pilgrims arrived, they found the coast lined with villages full of skeletons. They selected one of them to settle in and survived by raiding the abandoned food stores. They arrived in November and didn’t have a plan for what to eat until Spring.
Both peoples attributed the desolation to supernatural forces. The Pilgrims believed that God had cleared the land for them and the Wampanoag believed that the manitou were enraged.
By Spring, the remnants of the Wampanoag, who were now surviving as hunter-gatherers in the woods, decided to change their policy on Europeans. These Europeans would be allowed to stay, as long as they promised to be allies against their enemies inland. Although Massasoit didn’t trust Squanto (wisely), he needed him as a translator and diplomat.
Squanto spent the rest of his life trying to gain advantage by manipulating conflict between the colonists and natives, and then positioning himself as the essential peacemaker, until he too died from a European disease.
Southeast United States
Chapters 4 & 10
The first Europeans to explore the Southeast United States were de Soto and La Salle. They were more than 100 years apart: 1540s vs 1680s. No Europeans traveled through this area in between.
The accounts of the two journeys are wildly different. De Soto found many large fortified towns and armies of several thousand men. La Salle found the area deserted and the few people there were nomadic hunters. During the time between de Soto and La Salle, European diseases, introduced by the pigs of de Soto’s camp, caused apocalyptic loss of life and destroyed entire civilizations.
De Soto did not see a single live bison. La Salle found herds grazing in the plains along the river. There were tens of millions of bison in the United States in 1800. They were so plentiful that people hunted them without limits. By the end of that century, there were less than a thousand.
The population swings of passenger pigeons were even more dramatic. In early America, there were billions of them. Over a quarter of all of the birds on the continent were passenger pigeons. There were flocks so large that it took days for them to pass overhead. In 1914, the last passenger pigeon died in Cincinnati Zoo.
Both of these species are often used as examples of overhunting destroying the natural bounty of the wilderness. But North America was not wilderness. The environment had been heavily managed for thousands of years, by agriculture, forestry, and controlled burns. Humans were a keystone species, and they had been decimated by European diseases.
Before Columbus, North America did not have billions of passenger pigeons. Their bones are rare in archaeological sites, even compared to other bird bones. However, when most of the fertile farmland and managed forests opened up, they seized the opportunity and overran everything before collapsing.
The huge, and extremely fragile, populations of bison and passenger pigeons were not natural. They were outbreak populations. When a keystone species (in this case, humans) are removed, the populations of other species fluctuate wildly, with huge population booms and spectacular crashes.
Norte Chico
Chapter 6
Norte Chico is a stretch of dry coastline in Peru. It is in the rain shadow of the Andes, so it gets only a couple inches of precipitation a year – mostly as mist. There are rivers running down deep ravines from the glaciers in the Andes.
The Humbodlt current and upwelling zones bring cold water and nutrients up from the Antarctic and from the depths. The ocean off of Peru is extremely productive.
There are the remains of cities in Norte Chico dating from 3500 B.C. to 1800 B.C. This makes it one of the earliest centers of civilization in the world. Only Mesopotamia and Egypt clearly have older cities. All other cradles of civilization were based on growing grains in fertile river valleys. Norte Chico had neither fertile river valleys nor domesticated grains.
Instead, the cities of Norte Chico got most of their food from the sea. Fish bones outnumber the waste from any remnants from plant food, even in inland cities.
There were some crops grown on terraced and irrigated land. The most common crop was cotton. Rather than agriculture for food, Norte Chico had agriculture for textiles. These textiles were not unrelated to food – cotton nets dramatically increase how many fish you can catch. The inland cities along the river where cotton was grown were larger than the cities along the coast.
Grain based agriculture is not the only surprising thing missing in Norte Chico. There is no pottery. In Eurasian civilizations, pottery preceded agriculture by at least 10,000 years, and agriculture preceded cities by another 5,000 years. There are also no stone carvings. There are building made of stone, but no sculptures, bas-relief, drawing, or painting, even on interior walls. There is one drawing of the staff god (common in later Andean religions) that dates from this era, but the drawing might have been etched onto a petrified gourd that was already thousands of year old. The art seems to be entirely textiles and music from pelican bone flutes.
There are monumental mounds. Mann thinks that the labor for these mounds was organized by persuasion, not coercion. I’m not convinced. All other monumental architecture this early was built with slave labor. In the first states, there often wasn’t a big difference between slave and subject – the society consisted mostly of war captives. Mann’s main evidence for this is that there are remnants of feasts within the mounds (so the feasts had to occur during the construction) and that there is little evidence of war in any of these sites. The cities did not have walls and few of the skeletons found had died violent deaths.
The people of Norte Chico did mummify some of their dead, especially children who had died from malnutrition caused by intestinal worms. The mummies were painted and repainted, so, unlike in Egypt, they probably were not immediately buried. This suggest cultural continuity with the Inca millennia later who venerated their former leaders in temples centered around the leader’s mummy. People believed that, as long as the body is preserved, their soul still has power.
Amazon
Chapters 1 & 9
The Amazon is often considered the paradigmatic example of untouched wilderness.
There is increasing evidence that it was actually a center of pre-Columbian civilization that was completely destroyed by European diseases.
The clearest evidence of large human populations comes from the Beni savanna, on the southwest edge of the Amazon. The region is extremely flat and wet. Almost the entire area floods every rainy season and people burn it every dry season. Only a few trees grow, almost exclusively on small hills that dot the savanna. If you dig in these small, round hills, you find that they are filled with shards of pottery.[3]Note that this is thousands of years after Norte Chico, so everyone has pottery now. This suggests that the hills were man-made. Even more convincing are the straight causeways of raised earth connecting the hills. These are the work of a civilization that lived on the hills, farmed in raised fields, and managed the water flow to trap fish. The society had to have been large and complex enough to so thoroughly reorganize the landscape.
Farther into the Amazon forest itself, there was also large scale human civilization.
There is one Spanish account of the Amazon from the 1500s. Carvajal was the chaplain of an expedition which left the Andes looking for a lake of gold. Traveling through the steep, wet forests just east of the Andes was more difficult than expected. When half of the expedition found a large river, they thought that they must be close to the ocean and decided to raft out. Five months later, they eventually reached the ocean. Carvajal kept a careful record of how not treasonous abandoning the other half of their expedition was, and sometimes described his surroundings. The river was lined by large settlements, located close together. Most were hostile – the Spaniards were trying to raid for food. At the largest settlement, they were met by 200 war canoes, with 20-30 people each, and many more people lining the bluffs waving palm fronds. The soldiers wore feathered cloaks and used poisoned arrows. An orchestra accompanied the soldiers onto the water to signal attack. The Spaniards escaped only through the surprise caused by their firearms. Carvajal’s account was considered fictitious and wasn’t even published until the late 1800s. Not only was Carvajal’s captain definitely treasonous, but the Amazon shouldn’t have been able to support that large of a population.
Most of the Amazon has terrible soil: clays that retain very few nutrients. All of the nutrients are in the living plants. Anything in the soil gets washed out by the continual rain. The land can only be farmed for a few years after you clear the trees.
In some areas of the Amazon, there is terra preta, dark earth, which is extremely fertile. Terra preta is clearly man-made: it almost always contains pottery shards. Instead of burning the undergrowth in the open, people burned it underground with little oxygen so charcoal remains and added manure, small bones, and pottery shards. The charcoal retains nutrients, the bones and pottery keep the soil aerated, and microorganisms allow the soil to slowly replenish itself. Faced with soil too poor for agriculture, people created their own fertile soil.
Any place terra preta is found has had human agriculture. It is most often found on bluffs overlooking major rivers, but can be found in many other geologically distinct settings. Estimates vary widely as to how much of the Amazon has terra perta – between 0.1\% and 10\%. Even the small estimates could support a significant number of people. The larger estimates would mean that a significant fraction of the Amazon is not natural, but cultivated.
There is no archaeological evidence of large, cleared fields in the Amazon, which form the basis of agriculture elsewhere. Most of the crop domesticated in the Amazon are trees: fruits, nuts, and palms. Rather than clearing the forest for crops, in the Amazon, people managed the forest as a garden.
Since there is very little stone available, houses and other buildings had to be made of wood and other organic materials. These rot quickly in a tropical rainforest, leaving little evidence behind except shards of pottery, terra preta, and unusually productive areas of the forest.
Some of his other histories were less striking to me. His telling of Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca is very similar to how it is presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997). Mesoamerican civilizations were discussed repeatedly, but scattered across the book, not in chronological order, and mixed with stories of his personal experiences. Even though there probably is enough information to provide an outline of the history of the region, it is not organized in a way to make that transparent. I will not summarize either the Inca or Mesoamerica. I also will not summarize his stories about modern archaeologists, which are quite critical of the scientific community.
Conclusion
Despite not having a broad scientific foundation, Mann describes a lot of new science in 1491. Not all of the claims he presents have reached scientific consensus. That is a challenge of describing new science to the public: some debates are still ongoing. I don’t trust Mann to give an overview of the field and accurately represent the uncertainties therein. But Mann is excellent at taking either one side of the debate or a new scientific consensus and presenting it in a personable way. I enjoyed reading it and expect that you would too.
This is very thorough – I will admit I didn’t get through the full thing just yet. But so far I have loved your frank feedback on the things you didn’t like. I’m certain that when I get to the praise, it will be equally well thought out and accurate. 🙂 Thanks Chaostician!