1491

“Sixteenth-century New England housed 100,000 people or more, a figure that was slowly increasing. Most of those people lived in shoreline communities, where rising numbers were beginning to change agriculture from an option to a necessity. These bigger settlements required more centralized administration; natural resources like good land and spawning streams, though not scarce, now needed to be managed. In consequences, boundaries between groups were becoming more formal. Sachems, given more power and more to defend, pushed against each other harder. Political tensions were constant. Coastal and riverine New England, according to the archaeologist and ethnohistorian Peter Thomas, was an ‘ever-changing collage of personalities, alliances, plots, raids and encounters which involved every Indian [settlement].’” 

The above quote describes the diversity, size, and complexity of native society prior to the arrival of Europeans. Mann describes the change in these societies as they grew in population and complexity. Accompanying this growth is a political situation of similar complexity. This situation strongly refutes the idea of New England as all but uninhabited prior to the arrival of the first European settlers.

“In 1491 the Inca ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the resting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inca dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty thousand foot peaks of the Andes between. ‘If imperial potential is judged in terms of environmental adaptability,’ wrote the Oxford historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘the Inca were the most impressive empire builders of their day.’” 

The above passage emphasizes the "imperial" character of the Inca Empire. First, Mann compares the overall size of the Inca empire and stresses the variety of terrains and environments over which the Inca Empire ruled. In addition to pure size, this extra consideration has special significance: as the remainder of the chapter will illustrate, the ability of the Inca to effectively and unquestioningly exert power over different regions and peoples is a testament to its power and sophistication, and also provides clues to its eventual demise. 

“Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this pattern occurred again and again in the Americas. It was a kind of master narrative of postcontact history. In fact, Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation. Conquistadors tried to take Florida half a dozen times between 1510 and 1560—and failed each time. In 1532 King João III of Portugal divided the coast of Brazil into fourteen provinces and dispatched colonists to each one. By 1550 only two settlements survived. The French were barely able to sustain trading posts in the St. Lawrence and didn't even try to plant their flag in pre-epidemic New England. European microorganisms were slow to penetrate the Yucután Peninsula, where most of the Maya polities were too small to readily play off against each other. In consequence, Spain never fully subdued the Maya.” 

This quote provides a summary of the author's arguments on the correlation between political infighting/disease epidemics and European domination. Summarizing the work of Henry F. Dobyns, an anthropologist specializing in South America, the author argues that the coincidence of political infighting, coupled with disease epidemics, in these Native civilizations led to the rapid decimation of Native peoples. Where these conditions were not met, European subjugation was much more difficult, if not impossible. 

“About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when De Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an archaeologist with the University of New Mexico. By LaSalle's time the number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent immigrants. De Soto ‘had a privileged glimpse’ of an Indian world, Hudson told me. ‘The window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?’” 

In the above passage, Mann describes the scale of the depopulation of a portion of the North American native population—an event of mass death that occurred unseen by Europeans. The author describes this event as a civilization "crumbling," and poses the question as to what could have caused it. This question is significant, not only because it seeks to understand the causes of a major historical event, but that it exposes deep gaps in our understanding of the history of the North American continent and its Native peoples.

“Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone. And not just once, but over and over again. In our antibiotic era, how can we imagine what it means to have entire ways of life hiss away like steam? How can one assay the total impact of the unprecedented calamity that gave rise to the world we live in? It seems important to try.” 

This quotation describes loss from disease in cultural terms, contrasting it with the relative safety of the modern, "antibiotic" era. Likening cultures to volumes in a library, Mann describes the New World epidemics during the sixteenth century as a period of immense cultural loss, not just for the civilizations who suffered immediately, but for all people. In doing so, he also reaffirms the mission of his own project: attempting to assess what has been otherwise totally erased.

“Negotiating furiously, [Cortes] assembled a force of as many as 200,000 men and built thirteen big ships in an audacious plan to assault Tenochtitlan from the water. He followed this plan and ever after has been identified by history as the city's conqueror. But all of his bold resolve would have come to nothing without the vast indigenous army whose leaders believed they could use the Spanish presence to catalyze the destruction of the Triple Alliance. And even this enormous force might not have overcome the empire if while Cortés was building his ships Tenochtitlan had not been swept by smallpox in the same pandemic that later wiped out Tawantinsuyu. Without any apparent volition by Cortés, the great city lost at least a third of its population to the epidemic, including [its ruler] Cuitlahuac.” 

The above quotation gives credence to the "unfathomable determination" of Hernan Cortés yet places his efforts to conquer Tenochtitlan within a larger historical context, a context with both political and biological antecedents. In doing so, Mann cites another example of a pattern developing throughout his book: a large empire, beset with numerous internal fractures and divisions, weakened by the arrival of pathogens—prior to the arrival of Europeans. 

“In the late 1970s several scientists realized that an ethnic group's mitochondrial DNA could provide clues to its ancestry. Their reasoning was complex in detail, but simple in principle. People with similar mitochondria have, in the jargon, the same "haplogroup." If two ethnic groups share the same haplogroup, it is molecular proof that the two groups are related; their members belong to the same female line. In 1990 a team led by Douglas C. Wallace, now at the University of California at Irvine, discovered that just four mitochondrial haplogroups account for 96.9 percent of Native Americans—another example of Indian's genetic homogeneity, but one without any known negative (or positive) consequences. Three of the four haplogroups are common in Southern Siberia. Given the inheritance rules of mitochondrial DNA, the conclusion that Indians and Siberians share common ancestry seems, to geneticists, inescapable.” 

This passage discusses the use of genetic markers to support anthropological hypotheses and histories of Native American peoples. The relatively close connection between the mitochondrial DNA of Siberians and Native Americans is used as a sign of a shared ancestry between these general groups, and would seem to affirm that Native American ancestors crossed from Siberia to the Americas. 

“In a crisply argued paper in [the magazine] Science in 1964, Haynes drew attention to the correlation between the birth of 'an ice-free, trans Canadian corridor' and the 'abrupt appearance of Clovis artifacts some 700 years later.' Thirteen thousand to fourteen thousand years ago, he suggested, a window in time opened. During this interval—and, for all practical purposes, only during this interval—paleo-Indians could have crossed Beringia, slipped through the ice-free corridor, and descended into southern Alberta, from where they would have been able to spread throughout North America. The implication was that every Indian society in the hemisphere was descended from Clovis.”

This above passage summarizes the migration hypothesis by which the ancestors of Native Americans arrived on the continent. Mann includes this hypothesis as a companion to that of the genetic homogeneity studies. Together, they provide a clear—if hypothetical—view of the dramatic pre-history of the American continent. 

“The ultimate demise of the Clovis dogma was inevitable. David Henige, author of Numbers from Nowhere, told me [that] ‘[a]rchaeologists are always dating something to five years ago and then saying that this must be the first it occurred because they haven't found any earlier examples. And then, incredibly, they defend this idea to the death. It's logically indefensible.’ Clovis-first, he said, was ‘a classic example of arguing from silence. Even in archaeology, which isn't exactly rocket science’—he chuckled—‘there's only so long you can get away with it.’” 

This quote describes the gradual fall of the Clovis Theory, which attempted to put a hard date on the earliest migrations to the North American continent based on dates roughly contemporaneous with a speculated "ice-free bridge" between the American and Asian continents. This theory, however, proved to have a number of holes, not the least of which was the discovery of artifacts predating the Clovis trove. The quote describes the bias by which scientists and researchers grew to accept these theories.

“All of this is speculative, to say the least, and may well be wrong. Next year geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or more hunting sites could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the ‘New World.’ Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.” 

This quote succinctly describes many of the problems with hypotheses in anthropology and archaeology. The basic problem Mann cites is the unavailability of definite answers: at any time, there is the possibility that more evidence will be discovered that will force scientists and researchers to reevaluate—if not completely abandon—their theories. 

“Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world's most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world's squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.” 

Mann describes the significance of Mesoamerican agriculture not only for Native peoples but for the entire world. Mann adds that advancements in Mesoamerican agriculture not only expanded their food supply, but also led to further cultural advancements: without maize, advanced mathematics never happens. The importance of maize, then, extends not only to the well-being of the people but is the basis of a cultural identity that exists even in the present day.

“Like the Eurasian centers of civilization, Mesoamerica and the Andes were places where complex, long-lasting cultural traditions began. But there was a striking difference between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres: the degree of interaction between their great cultural centers. A constant traffic in goods and ideas among Eurasian societies allowed them to borrow or steal each other's most interesting innovations: algebra from Islam, paper from China, the spinning wheel (probably) from India, the telescope from Europe. ‘In my lectures, I put this very baldly,’ Alfred Crosby told me. ‘I say that nobody in Europe or Asia ever invented—they got it from somebody else.’”

This passage, including the quote from Alfred Crosby, emphasizes the high degree of cultural osmosis in Eurasia, and its subsequent effect on technological advancement. As the theory goes, the high culture-to-culture contact permitted by a contiguous landmass enabled technology to spread and improve, to the extent where tracking the invention of a single piece of technology—say, the wheel—is difficult to pinpoint.

“From the historian's point of view, the difference between the two models is unimportant. In both, Indians took the first steps toward modern maize in southern Mexico, probably in the highlands, more than six thousand years ago […] [M]odern maize was the outcome of a bold act of conscious biological manipulation—‘arguably man's first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering.’” 

This passage again emphasizes the significance of maize in both history of Mesoamerica and the world. The crop is evidence of a long-standing tradition of agriculture; further, while we tend to think of genetic engineering as a relatively-recent concept, here we see that Mesoamericans were doing something similar millennia prior. 

“In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec believed that celestial phenomena like the phases of the moon and Venus affect daily life. To measure and predict these portents requires careful sky watching and a calendar. Strikingly Mesoamerican societies developed three calendars: a 365-day secular calendar like the contemporary calendar; a 260-day sacred calendar that was like no other calendar on earth; and the equally unique Long Count, a one-by-one tally of the days since a fixed starting point thousands of years ago. Establishing these three calendars required advances in astronomy; synchronizing them required ventures into mathematics.” 

The above passage describes how the timekeeping systems of these Mesoamerican civilizations reflected their cultural priorities. In contrast to the focus on accounting in ancient Near East civilizations (such as Sumer), the focus in Mesoamerica (at least in part) was the creation and maintenance of three separate calendars (daily, sacred, and Long Count). In order to predict events and attain balance between the cosmic, the secular, and the sacred, Mesoamerican societies needed a regulatory tool; this tool was math. 

“The complexity of a society's technology has little to do with its level of social complexity—something that we, in our era of rapidly changing, seemingly overwhelming technology, have trouble grasping. Every society, big or little, misses out on ‘obvious’ technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact on people's lives—imagine Europe with efficient plows or the Maya with iron tools—but not much effect on the scale of a civilization's endeavors, as shown by both European and Maya history. The corollary is that widespread and open trade in ideas is the best way to make up for the lacunae. Alas, Mesoamerica was limited in this respect. Like Europe, it was an extraordinarily diverse place with a shared cultural foundation. But where Europe had the profoundly different civilizations of China and Islam to steal from, Mesoamerica was alone in the world.” 

Here, Mann provides a partial explanation for the conspicuous gaps in technological achievement—gaps he calls “lacunae.”The most significant of these lacunae in 1491 is the missed development of the wheel in Mesoamerica. Mann connects this missed phase of development to the relatively slow progress of the plow in Europe. He also references an earlier point made of the significance of cultural contact in making up for these blind spots, an opportunity made more difficult for relatively-isolated Mesoamerican civilizations. 

“The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people's will; 'great best,' in which the rulers' power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and 'great fraud,' in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince its people of its inherent authority. Every state is a mix of all of these elements, but in Tiwanaku, the proportion of 'great fraud' may have been especially high.”  

The Tiwanaku’s capital city was on the shore of Lake Titicaca, on the border of Bolivia and Peru. The Tiwanaku were able to rule through a combination of “state religion and imperial ideology,” (262). Local rulers of the Wari, a nearby Native group were “fearful of the supernatural powers controlled by [the Tiwanuka] priesthood,” and subordinated themselves (262). The Tiwanaku, then, were able to intimidate without ever lifting a weapon, instead using the power of the theological to show they were in control. 

“Indians as poster children for eco-catastrophe, Indians as green role models: the two images contradict each other less than they seem. Both are variants of Holmberg's Mistake, the idea that Indians were suspended in time, touching nothing and untouched themselves, like ghostly presences on the landscape. The first two sections of this book were devoted to two different ways that researchers have recently repudiated this perspective [...] In this section I treat another facet of Holmberg's Mistake: the idea that native cultures did not or could not control their environment. The view that Indians left no footprint on the land is an obvious example. That they marched heedlessly to tragedy is a subtler one. Both depict indigenous people as passively accepting whatever is meted out to them, whether it is the fruits of undisturbed ecosystems or the punishment for altering them.” 

Mann seeks to disprove assumptions that present simplistic ideas of Native civilizations as insubstantial or unreflective, in respect to their relationships with their environments. The author believes that these assumptions, collectively, contribute to an idea of Native civilization that downplays its significance and trivializes its history and cultural abilities.

“Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for their comfort and their convenience, the American landscape had come to fit their lives like comfortable clothing. It was a highly successful and stable system, if ‘stable’ is the appropriate word for a regime that involves routinely shrouding miles of countryside in smoke and ash. And it was a system that Indians were abandoning in ever-rising numbers at the time when Europeans came.”

This passage details the use of fire in Native American civilizations up to the arrival of Europeans. Mann suggests that the shape and character of the North American interior was a reflection of large-scale environmental augmentation by Native civilizations, much of it through the use of slash-and-burn agriculture, to clear vegetation and replenish soil. 

“The biggest difficulty in reconstructing the pre-Colombian past is the absence of voices from that past. Mesoamerican people left behind texts that are slowly giving up their secrets, but in other areas the lack of written languages has left a great silence. Hints of past events can be found in Native American oral traditions, to be sure, but these are concerned more with interpreting eternal truths than the details of journalism and history. The Bible has much to teach, yet professors must use it judiciously, supplementing it with other sources, when they teach ancient Middle Eastern history. In the same way, preserved Indian lore throws a brilliantly colored but indirect light on the past. To understand long-ago Indian lives, one cannot avoid the accounts of the first literate people who saw them: European swashbucklers, fortune hunters, and missionaries.” 

The above passage describes a perennial problem in "primary source" anthropology: the difficulty of adapting materials to the problems of historical reconstruction. Earlier in the book, Mann describes how the "silence" of lost civilizations creates problems by inviting speculation. So, too, can the accounts of Europeans who travelled to the Americas, as implicit (or explicit) cultural bias can distort the truth. Nonetheless, in some cases, such accounts can be almost all that anthropologists have to work from.

“‘The basic thing about the Amazon is that these people had a long-term period to learn about and experience and benefit from their knowledge of their environment,’ Meggers said. ‘Any group that overexploited their environment was going to be dead. The ones that survived, the knowledge got built into their ideology and behavior with taboos and other kinds of things.’ Having reached the optimal cultural level for their environment, she explained, Amazon Indian lives changed little, if at all, for at least two thousand years.” 

Archaeologist Betty Meggers's statement describes both the high stakes of life in the Amazon region and the importance of adaption to these harsh conditions. The paradigm she outlines is simple: get it right, or die trying. However, in considering how civilizations applied this harsh paradigm, it adds new significance to the cultural traditions and practices these tribes created, refined, and passed on. Further, these traditions sustained Amazonians for millennia.

“Throughout Amazonia, farmers prize terra preta for its great productivity; some have worked it for years with minimal fertilization. Among them are the owners of the papaya orchard I visited, who have happily grown crops on their terra preta for two decades. More surprising still, the ceramics in the farm's terra preta indicate that the soil has retained its nutrients for as much as a millennium. On a local level, terra preta is valuable enough for locals to dig it up and sell as potting soil, an activity that, alas, has already destroyed countless artifacts.” 

Mann describes the significance of terra preta, the term for "Indian dark earth," and its valuable status after hundreds—if not thousands—of years of development. For the societies of the Amazon region, soil cultivation was a subject of the utmost urgency. Today, its continuing value and demand can endanger archaeological studies, as the earth is constantly being moved and potential dig sites are unintentionally disrupted.

“Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years. As Cahokia shows, they made mistakes. But by and large they modified their landscapes in stable, supple resilient ways. Some milpa areas have been farmed for thousands of years—time in which farmers in Mesopotamia and North Africa and parts of India ruined their land. Even the wholesale transformation seen in places like Peru, where irrigated terraces cover huge areas, were exceptionally well done. But all of these efforts required close, continual oversight. In the sixteenth century, epidemics removed the boss.” 

Mann describes the significant connection Native civilizations had with the land, and their erudite ability to manage it, though there were exceptions, such as the mound-building Cahokia in the American Midwest. Regardless, disease epidemics, Mann argues, would disallow for Native populations to be the expert stewards of the land that they’d once been.

“When the newcomers moved west, they were preceded by a wave of disease and then a wave of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to tamp down, and it was followed by many aftershocks. 'The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,' wrote historian Stephen Pyne, 'it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.' Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily created it.” 

This passage, adapting a quote from historian Stephen Pyne, describes the impressions of Europeans arriving on the American continent through an ecological context—one of collapse. What predicates this collapse, Pyne and Mann argue, is disease, which tears through Native populations during the 16th century. Because of such epidemics, and Native peoples’ inability to work the land in the same manner they had been prior to the epidemics, the physical landscape of the Americas changes drastically in just a few generations, as the overall Native population decreases. The American landscape that Europeans would witness from the 18th century forward was one of their own, unwitting creation, as diseases brought to the New World had decimated populations millennia prior.