1491 (95 page)
For library access, travel tips, withering critiques, friendly encouragement at psychologically critical times, and a daunting list of other favors I owe debts to Bob Crease, Josh D’Aluisio-Guerreri, Dan Farmer (and all the folks on the fish.com listservs), Dave Freedman, Judy Hooper, Pam Hunter (and Carl, too, of course), Toichiro and Masa Kinoshita, Steve Mann, Cassie Phillips, Ellen Shell, Neal Stephenson, Gary Taubes, Dick Teresi, and Zev Trachtenberg. Newell Blair Mann was a boon traveling companion in Bolivia and Brazil; Bruce Bergethon indulged me by coming to Cahokia; Peter Menzel went with me to Mexico four times. Jim Boyce helped get me to Oaxaca and CIMMYT. Nick Springer provided a design for the rough maps that Tim Gibson and I put together. Stephen S. Hall was really, really patient and really, really helpful about the immune system. Ify and Ekene Nwokoye tried at various times to keep me organized. Brooke Childs worked on photo permissions. Mark Plummer provided me with far too many favors to list. The same for Rick Balkin (the fifth book for which he has done so). June Kinoshita and Tod Machover allowed me to finish Chapter 4 in their carriage house in Waltham. My deepest gratitude to Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, who let my family and me stay in their guesthouse in Napa, where Chapters 6 through 8 emerged into the world. Caroline Mann read an early draft and provided many useful comments. Last-minute help from Dennis Normile and the Foreign Correspondents Club of Tokyo is hereby recognized and thanked.
I am lucky in my publishers, Knopf in the United States and Granta in the United Kingdom. In this, our third book together, Jon Segal at Knopf demonstrated his mastery of not only the traditional pencil skills of the classic editor but also the new techniques the times require to send a book on its way. In addition, I must doff my beret in Borzoi land to Kevin Bourke, Roméo Enriquez, Ida Giragossian, Andy Hughes, and Virginia Tan. At Granta, Sara Holloway gave excellent advice and tolerated repeated auctorial meddling and procrastination. So many other people in so many places pulled strings on my behalf, tolerated repeated phone calls, arranged site visits, edited or checked manuscripts, and sent me hard-to-find articles and books that I could not possibly list them all. I hope that in the end this book seems to them worth the trouble.
CHARLES C. MANN
1491
Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for
Science
and
The Atlantic Monthly
, and has cowritten four previous books, including
Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species
and
The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he has won awards from the American Bar Association, the Margaret Sanger Foundation, the American Institute of Physics, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others. His writing was twice selected for both
The Best American Science Writing
and
The Best American Science and Nature Writing
. He lives with his wife and their children in Amherst, Massachusetts.
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)
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
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2006
Copyright © 2005, 2006 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 slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.
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-13: 978-0-307-27818-0
eISBN-10: 0-307-27818-2
Author photograph © J.D. Sloan
v1.0
*1
According to Joseph Conrad, the violence was of culinary origin. “The Noble Red Man was a mighty hunter,” explained the great novelist, “but his wives had not mastered the art of conscientious cookery—and the consequences were deplorable. The Seven Nations around the Great Lakes and the Horse tribes of the plains were but one vast prey to raging dyspepsia.” Because their lives were blighted by “the morose irritability which follows the consumption of ill-cooked food,” they were continually prone to quarrels.
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*2
In the United States and parts of Europe the name is “corn.” I use “maize” because Indian maize—multicolored and mainly eaten after drying and grinding—is strikingly unlike the sweet, yellow, uniform kernels usually evoked in North America by the name “corn.” In Britain, “corn” can mean the principal cereal crop in a region—oats in Scotland, for example, are sometimes referred to by the term.
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*3
The
Mayflower
passengers are often called “Puritans,” but they disliked the name. Instead they used terms like “separatists,” because they separated themselves from the Church of England, or “saints,” because their church, patterned on the early Christian church, was the “church of saints.” “Pilgrims” is the title preferred by the Society of Mayflower Descendants.
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*4
The first Europeans known to have reached the Americas were the Vikings, who appeared off eastern Canada in the tenth century. Their short-lived venture had no known effect on native life. Other European groups may also have arrived before Columbus, but they, too, had no well-substantiated impact on the people they visited.
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