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Loading... 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (edition 2006)by Charles C. Mann
Work Information1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
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A must for anyone interested in American anthropology. It emphasizes the control exerted over the environment by early Americans. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the changes in fauna, though it was too short. The appendices were all very interesting as well ( ) (2005) Fair discourse on what the Americas were like before Columbus ?discovered? it. Kirkus:Unless you're an anthropologist, it's likely that everything you know about American prehistory is wrong. Science journalist Mann's survey of the current knowledge is a bracing corrective.Historians once thought that prehistoric Indian peoples somehow lived outside of history, adrift and directionless, ?passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way?; that view was central to the myth of the noble savage. In fact, writes Mann (Noah's Choice, with Mark L. Plummer, 1995), Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms; and their home continents ?were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined.? In defending this view, Mann visits several thriving controversies in the historic/prehistoric record. One is the question of pre-contact demographics: old-school scholars had long advanced the idea that there were only a few million Native Americans at the time of the Columbian arrival, whereas revisionists in the 1960s posited that there were eight million on the island of Hispaniola alone, a figure punctured by revisionists of revisionism, now beset by Native American activists for the political incorrectness of adjusting the census. Another controversy is the chronology of human presence in the Americas: the old date of 12,000 b.c., courtesy of the Bering Land Bridge in Alaska, no longer cuts it. Other arguments center on the nature of Native American societies such as the Aztec and Inca, the latter of whom built a great empire that, defying Western notions of logic, had no market component. Mann addresses each controversy with care, according the old-timers their due while making it clear that his sympathies lie, in the main, with the rising generation. He closes with a provocative thesis: namely, that the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, ?living, breathing role models of human liberty.?An excellent, and highly accessible, survey of America's past: a worthy companion to Jake Page's In the Hands of the Great Spirit (2003).Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2005ISBN: 1-4000-4006-XPage Count: 480Publisher: KnopfReview Posted Online: May 20, 2010Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005 Really, really good. i can't pretend i could assess the quality of the history - although it certainly seems well researched and cited - but it's eye opening about the complexity of politics and human organisation and agriculture etc in the Americas before European invasion. goes through biology, anthropology, archaeology and history to talk about things like native American ways of maintaining land for food - showing up the falsity of the pristine wilderness myth- and the complex political interactions which helped European dominance in the early days. the European invasion is only talked about a little bit but as part of an attempt to restore history to native Americans - the invasion wasn't something that just happened, it was something that different societies responded to in different ways and fought from the start while sometimes collaborating to win influence over their own enemies. he emphasises that many of the groups that were studied as proof of native American "noble savage" nature were the remnants of larger cultures ravaged by disease and attacked constantly by Europeans - this was not their "natural" state i could quibble a bit over his politics (not radical enough and the coda is very American patriot, although he voices his support for returning native lands on a large scale - also feel he could maybe quote modern Indians more) and if i knew more about the subject I'm sure i could criticise more but for me it was a fascinating, perspective changing book about something i didn't know enough about. can only be seen as an introduction because of the scope of the subject, but gives you an idea of just how much history there is and tells you enough to make you rethink assumptions
Mann has written an impressive and highly readable book. Even though one can disagree with some of his inferences from the data, he does give both sides of the most important arguments. 1491 is a fitting tribute to those Indians, present and past, whose cause he is championing. 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. 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. Mann's style is journalistic, employing the vivid (and sometimes mixed) metaphors of popular science writing: "Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift. . . . its coastline hits the ocean floor and crumples up like a carpet shoved into a chairleg." Similarly, the book is not a comprehensive history, but a series of reporter's tales: He describes personal encounters with scientists in their labs, archaeologists at their digs, historians in their studies and Indian activists in their frustrations. Readers vicariously share Mann's exposure to fire ants and the tension as his guide's plane runs low on fuel over Mayan ruins. These episodes introduce readers to the debates between older and newer scholars. Initially fresh, the journalistic approach eventually falters as his disorganized narrative rambles forward and backward through the centuries and across vast continents and back again, producing repetition and contradiction. The resulting blur unwittingly conveys a new sort of the old timelessness that Mann so wisely wishes to defeat. Has the adaptationIs abridged inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
References to this work on external resources. Wikipedia in English (40)History.
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HTML: NATIONAL BESTSELLER ? A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492??from ??a remarkably engaging writer? (The New York Times Book Review). No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)970.01History and Geography North America North America North America -1599LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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