When Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history “Guns, Germs and Steel” came out in 1997 it made quite a splash. “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles Mann appeared less than a decade later in 2005. Diamond’s and Mann’s core arguments partly support each other – both stress that Old World diseases decimated native populations and made European conquest possible – but they diverge sharply on deeper causes. Diamond frames Eurasian dominance as a near-inevitable outcome of geography and ecology, which gave Europeans more domesticable species and an east–west axis that sped innovation, leaving the Americas constrained by comparison. Mann challenges this, arguing that native societies were highly advanced in their own right, managing vast landscapes, domesticating crucial crops, and building sophisticated cities – undone not by inherent ecological disadvantage, but by the catastrophic arrival of European germs. Thus, while germs unite their stories, Mann’s work serves as a corrective to Diamond’s environmental determinism, emphasizing the agency, complexity, and achievements of the pre-Columbian world.
“1491” sets out to reconstruct the Western Hemisphere on the eve of European contact, aiming to sweep away the old romantic or tragic clichés of “untouched wilderness” and “small scattered bands of noble savages.” In their place, Mann offers a provocative and at times controversial portrait of two continents teeming with people, bustling with trade, governed by sophisticated polities, and profoundly transformed by human hands long before Columbus ever set sail. He concedes that not everyone in the field agrees. “The forest the first New England colonist thought was primevel and enduring was actually in the midst of violent change and demographic collapse,” Mann writes. Indeed, “this Edenic world was largely an inadvertent European creation … the product of demographic calamity” that started centuries before the Pilgrims lands at Plymouth Rock in 1620.
Mann is something of an ambivalent revisionist. You can often tell a lot about someone – particularly an academic – by the language they employ. For instance, in 1491 Mann uses “Indian” and not the more politically correct “Native American” (primarily, he tells us, because Native Americans evidently actually prefer to be called Indians) and when it comes to dating events, he uses “BC/AD” rather than the more scholarly appropriate “BCE/CE” (because both measure time by the birth of Christ, so “what’s the difference?”). However, when it comes to proper names he is maddingly woke – in 1491 popular Pilgrim translator Squanto is “Tisquantum,” doomed Aztec leader Montezuma is “Motecuhzoma,” New England is “Dawnland,” the Aztec empire is the “Triple Alliance,” and the Inca capital city Cusco is “Qosqo” (“equal in grandeur to any city in Europe,” he says). Mann really leans into it whe it comes to North American Indian tribes: Cherokees are “Ani Yun Wiya,” Iroquois are “Haudenosaunee,” and Comache are “Nermerpuh.” If you think this somehow adds value, I guess we’ll just have to “agree to disagree.”
At the core of Mann’s book is the assertion that the pre-Columbian Americas were vastly more populous, ecologically managed, and culturally complex than the traditional narrative ever allowed (e.g. unknown cities in Peru older than the Egyptian Pyramids). The supposedly “primitive” hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon first encountered by Western anthropologists in the early twentieth century were not untouched remnants of the Pleistocene (Ice Age), but the devastated survivors of once-complex civilizations – a misconception Mann calls “Holmberg’s Mistake,” after Allan Holmberg, whose influential 1950 book “Nomads of the Longbow” wrongly assumed that Native Americans existed in an “eternal, unhistoried state.”
Mann draws on recent scholarship in archaeology, anthropology, ethnohistory, and epidemiology to argue that the Americas were, according to “High Counter” scholars, home to perhaps 60 to 100 million people by 1491 – numbers that rival or surpass Europe’s population at the same time. Mann is careful to note that these estimates are still debated, but he marshals an array of potential evidence: the sprawling urban remains of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, larger and cleaner than any contemporary European city; the intricate road and administrative systems of the Inca Empire, stretching 2,500 miles along the Andes; the extensive mound complexes of Cahokia near present-day St. Louis, which housed tens of thousands; and the possibly dense Amazonian societies who may have practiced a kind of agro-forestry that shaped the rainforest into an anthropogenic mosaic rather than untouched primeval jungle. In short, the Americas before Columbus was “a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a region where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshiped as people do everywhere,” Mann says. “Indians were neither the peaceful, love-thy-neighbor types envisioned by some apologists or the brutal, ceaselessly aggressive warriors decried by some political critics.”
Mann also notes that many of the greatest civilizations disappeared by 900 AD, half a millennium before Columbus arrived. The magnificent ruins of the Mayan civilization of the Yucatan peninsula were only first re-discovered in the 1840s. He says that “fractious” Mayan city states, the Mutal and Kaan, with “a sophisticated and widely shared culture flourished among perpetual division and conflict” like Athens and Sparta,” ultimately wiped each other out by 869 AD. The fabulous ruins of Chichen Itza were actually the hinterlands of this once great culture, Mann says. Further north, the Adena civilization in the Mississippi Valley lasted from 800 BC to 100 BC. The succeeding Hopewell sphere lasted until perhaps 400 AD. The Mississippi culture followed that and culminated in the Cahokia, the only real city established north of the Rio Grande before European colonization, that was preeminent from 950 AD to 1250 AD. One might ask: how do we know all of this? Besides the archaeological record left at Monks Bank outside St. Louis, Missouri, Mann says that the pollen sediments left in river beds left tell-tale signs. Personally, I would like to see more evidence.
And what did these civilizations in? A combination of droughts, floods, and earthquakes, Mann claims. By the 1350 AD these magnificent cultures had been decimated just as dramatically as future European colonization and Old World disease, Mann says. Some claim that central Mexico did not recover its fifteenth century population until the late 1960s.
The experience of Hernando de Soto – “half warrior, half venture capitalist” in Mann’s estimation – is possibly illustrative. He landed near Tampa Bay, Florida in 1539. His band of treasure hunters cut through the southeast with a band of 600 soldiers, 200 horses, and 300 pigs that Mann calls an “ambulatory meat locker.” The pigs, in particular, were deadly carriers of anthrax and tuberculosis, among other zoonotic diseases, that they likely easily passed to indigenous deer and turkeys. Mann concedes that while there is no solid physical evidence that early Native Americans died of a pig-trasmitted disease, he noted that whereas de Soto’s team noted thriving Indian settlements all along the Mississippi River basin, a century later European trappers found a landscape largely in a state of nature, largely devoid of human life. Mann notes that his logic is post hoc ergo propter hoc, it seems reasonable to believe that the Spanish sojourn through Indian country inadvertently destroyed it.
Mann does his best to get away from such flimsy logical arguments. Much of this scholarship rests on the devastating impact of disease. Mann contends that European-introduced epidemics – smallpox, measles, influenza, and more – preceded or accompanied the earliest waves of conquest, sweeping across the Americas like wildfire and reducing indigenous populations by as much as 90 percent in some regions within a century. The “empty wilderness” that seventeenth-century European settlers thought they found was often a landscape of ghost villages and recently abandoned fields. Mann calls this the “Great Dying,” and argues that it must be understood as a primary lens for interpreting the collision between Old World and New. By this account, Europeans did not so much conquer robust, intact civilizations at full strength as they arrived amid catastrophic demographic collapse. This helps explain how relatively small bands of Spaniards could topple powerful empires like the Aztecs and Incas: they were often striking societies already reeling from demographic implosion.
Just as striking is Mann’s portrayal of how indigenous peoples transformed their environments. The traditional image of Native Americans living lightly on the land, taking only what nature freely gave, is replaced here by a far more dynamic picture. Mann argues that many indigenous societies were “actively engineering their surroundings,” whether through the creation of terra preta (rich Amazonian dark earths) in the rainforest, the deliberate burning of forests by North American groups to create vast park-like hunting grounds, or the sophisticated irrigation and terracing systems of the Andes. The pristine wilderness so admired by early European writers may itself have been a product of indigenous management, suddenly ended by disease.
Indeed, Mann seems to show that South American cultures show that all imperial societies are the same. For instance, at the time of his death in 1493, Inca leader Thupa Inka was, in terms of area conquered during his lifetime, in the league of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, according to Mann. The Incan empire followed a familiar pattern: first, foraging societies develop agriculture; second, increased food production leads to a population explosion; third, as society grows, it stratifies, with powerful clerics at the top and peasants at the bottom; fourth, massive public works, presumably supported by taxation, ensue; and, finally, intermittent strife and war develop.
The Inca developed a cult of personality around its deified generals and never learned to fight in uniformed mass. Mann says the blame for the Inca’s stunning defeat should be focused on their centralized command structure. In short, the Inca were defeated by disease and factionalism, not steel and horses. By the time the Europeans arrived they were fighting battered and fragmented cultures already decimated and depopulated by disease and psychological dislocation. Western diseases were dropped on Incan societies like so many weapons of mass destruction: smallpox (1533), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614), measles (1618). Within 150 years of first contact 95 percent of the population had died. “Disaease turned whole societies to ash,” Mann writes, and presumably back-to-back-to-back disease turns ash to the wind.
Mann’s narrative ranges across the hemisphere. He devotes chapters to the intellectual sophistication of Andean quipu record-keeping (knotted strings that served as administrative and possibly mnemonic tools), to the political complexities of alliances and rivalries that shaped encounters like Cortés’s march on Tenochtitlan, and to the philosophical and scientific worldviews of different native societies. In each case, he pushes back, perhaps with too much force, against dismissive stereotypes that long relegated Native Americans to the sorry margins of world history.
Yet the book is not without its skeptics, and Mann himself is conscientious in acknowledging the limits of the evidence. The most contentious debates center around pre-contact population figures. Scholars like the anthropologist David Henige have argued that estimates of 60 to 100 million are often speculative, drawn from slender archaeological footprints and later colonial reports that were themselves distorted by misunderstanding or political motives. Similarly, the interpretation of Amazonia as relatively densely populated has faced challenges; some archaeologists, such as Betsy Meggers, caution that while earthworks and dark soils are real, they do not necessarily imply city-like settlements or large populations, and that the forest’s carrying capacity may have been lower than Mann suggests.
There are also disagreements over the extent to which pre-Columbian societies truly reshaped the environment. While many historians and ecologists now accept that indigenous burning and cultivation profoundly influenced North America’s landscapes, others point out that ecosystems are complex and sometimes resistant to sweeping generalizations. The idea that much of the Amazon was a “built landscape” has generated lively controversy, with some researchers arguing for extensive anthropogenic impacts, and others stressing that these were often localized amid vast stretches of minimally disturbed forest.
Even so, Mann’s achievement is to show how these debates themselves mark a radical shift from older paradigms. Where previous generations of scholars (and popular histories) tended to erase or downplay indigenous agency, 1491 places Native Americans squarely at the center of the story. Mann is less concerned with nailing down a single population number than with dismantling the myth of a sparsely inhabited, static New World awaiting European discovery and improvement.
Mann does not romanticize indigenous societies; he notes their wars, hierarchies, and brutalities. But he insists that they deserve to be understood on their own sophisticated terms, not as mere preludes to European dominion. 1491 remains one of the most influential works for general audiences on the Americas before Columbus. It helped spark broader public interest in new archaeological findings and encouraged a more respectful, complex view of New World history. Its greatest contribution may be the invitation to imagine a Western Hemisphere that was already profoundly shaped by human hands and minds – an invitation to rethink the very meaning of what was “discovered” in 1492. While scholarly debates continue over numbers, timelines, and environmental impact, Mann’s larger point endures: the Americas may not have been a blank slate, but a dynamic, densely populated, and culturally rich world whose encounter with Europe set off transformations that still echo today.
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