1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Where to buy 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus books online?

• ISBN13: 9781400032051
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. From the astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which had running water, immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city, to the Mexican corn that was so carefully made in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to know. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.Amazon.com Review
1491 is not so much the tale of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and regularly-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on clarify the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different tales have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with scenery, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even “timeless” natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is automatically speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that regularly end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist tales are among the best-founded: the tales of early American-European contact. To many of persons who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And persons who came later and establish an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and additional diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population lacking immunity, which swept through the Americas quicker than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. –Tom Nissley

A 1491 Timeline

Europe and Asia	Dates	The Americas
	25000-35000 B.C.	Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats.
Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer.	6000
	5000	In what many scientists regard as humankind’s first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species.
First cities customary in Sumer.	4000
	3000	The Americas’ first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structures
Fantastic Pyramid at Giza	2650
	32	First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero–an invention, widely described as the most vital algebraic discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s)
	800-840 A.D.	Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war
Vikings briefly set up first European settlements in North America.	1000	Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.* Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000.
Black Death devastates Europe.	1347-1351
	1398	Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Planet.
The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.	1492	The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.
Syphilis rumor has it that brought to Europe by Columbus’s returning crew.	1493
Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage.	1519	Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox** Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire.
	1525-1533	The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro.
	1617	Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors.
English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth.	1620

Buy Cheap 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Online

Related posts:

1. The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets Of Americas Wealthy
2. The Life of Columbus; In His Own Words
3. A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror