In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago existed mainly in small, nomadic bands and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. An obvious stumbling block in this effort is the term "Indian" itself, a misnomer that homogenizes the distinctiveness of indigenous peoples.A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Mann emphasizes the distinct identities of "Indian" tribes, while looking to bring forth their complex political and social history. While Mann maintains that one of the main elements for this view is ignorance-there is a simple lack of materials with which to document and verify aspects of these societies-Mann also argues that the prejudices that prescribe and separate cultural identities simplify accounts. Built into this belief, Mann argues, is the prejudice that characterizes non-European societies as intrinsically "simple" and "innocent," and lacking the historical, cultural, and political sophistication of contemporaneous European societies.
The author, Charles Mann, seeks to refute what he calls "Holmberg's Mistake"-the belief that no substantial cultural history existed in these regions before the arrival of European settlers and colonists. The first chapter of 1491 describes the gaps and oversimplifications of the conventional accounts of the history of the Americas, prior to the arrival of Europeans.
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