http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09baker.html

October 9, 2005

'1491': Vanished Americans

By KEVIN BAKER

MOST of us know, or think we know, what the first Europeans encountered
when they began their formal invasion of the Americas in 1492: a pristine
world of overwhelming natural abundance and precious few people; a
hemisphere where - save perhaps for the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of
Central America and the Incan state in Peru - human beings indeed trod
lightly upon the earth. Small wonder that, right up to the present day,
American Indians have usually been presented as either underachieving
metahippies, tree-hugging saints or some combination of the two.

The trouble with all such stereotypes, as Charles C. Mann points out in his
marvelous new book, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus," is that they are essentially dehumanizing. For cultural reasons
of their own, Europeans and white Americans have "implicitly depicted
Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original
wild state. Because history is change, they were people without history."

Mann, a science journalist and co-author of four previous books on subjects
ranging from aspirin to physics to the Internet, provides an important
corrective - a sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before the
arrival of Columbus. This would be a formidable task under any
circumstance, and it is complicated by the fact that so much of the deep
American past is embroiled in vituperative political and scientific
controversies.

Nearly everything about the Indians is currently a matter of contention.
There is little or no agreement about when their ancestors first came to
the Americas and where they came from; how many there were, how and where
they lived and why they were not more effective in resisting the European
invasion. New archaeological discoveries and interpretations of Indian
materials are constantly altering the historical record, and every debate
comes equipped with its own bevy of archaeologists, anthropologists and
other social scientists tossing around personal invective with the abandon
of Rudy Giuliani on a bad day.

Mann navigates adroitly through the controversies. He approaches each in
the best scientific tradition, carefully sifting the evidence, never
jumping to hasty conclusions, giving everyone a fair hearing - the experts
and the amateurs; the accounts of the Indians and their conquerors. And
rarely is he less than enthralling. A remarkably engaging writer, he
lucidly explains the significance of everything from haplogroups to
glottochronology to landraces. He offers amusing asides to some of his
adventures across the hemisphere during the course of his research, but
unlike so many contemporary journalists, he never lets his personal
experiences overwhelm his subject.

Instead, Mann builds his story around what we want to know - the
"Frequently Asked Questions," as he heads one chapter. He moves nimbly back
and forth from the earliest prehistoric humans in the Americas to the
Pilgrims' first encounter with the Indian they (mistakenly) called
"Squanto"; from the villages of the Amazon rain forests to Cahokia, near
modern St. Louis, the sole, long-vanished city of the North American Mound
Builders; from the cultivation of maize to why it was that the Incas
apparently developed the wheel but never used it as anything but a child's
toy.

Mann remains resolutely agnostic on some of the fiercest debates. What he
is most interested in showing us is how American Indians - like all other
human beings - were intensely involved in shaping the world they lived in.
He is sure that "many though not all Indians were superbly active land
managers - they did not live lightly on the land." Just how they did live,
so long uninfluenced by the vast majority of the world's population in
Africa and Eurasia, forms the bulk of his fascinating narrative.

What emerges is an epic story, with a subtly altered tragedy at its heart.
For all the European depredations in the Americas, the work of conquest was
largely accomplished for them by their microbes, even before the white men
arrived in any great numbers. The diseases brought along by the very first
unwitting Spanish conquistadors, and probably by English fishermen working
the New England coast, very likely triggered one of the greatest
catastrophes in human history. Before the 16th century, there may have been
as many as 90 million to 112 million people living in the Americas - people
who could be as different from each other "as Turks and Swedes," but who
had cumulatively developed an incredible range of natural environments,
from seeding the Amazon Basin with fruit trees to terracing the mountains
of Peru. (Even the term "New World" may be a misnomer; it is possible that
the world's first city was in South America.)

Then, disaster. According to some estimates, as much as 95 percent of the
Indians may have died almost immediately on contact with various European
diseases, particularly smallpox. That would have amounted to about
one-fifth of the world's total population at the time, a level of
destruction unequaled before or since. The exact numbers, like everything
else, are in dispute, but it is clear that these plagues wreaked havoc on
traditional Indian societies. European misreadings of America should not be
attributed wholly to ethnic arrogance. The "savages" most of the colonists
saw, without ever realizing it, were usually the traumatized, destitute
survivors of ancient and intricate civilizations that had collapsed almost
overnight. Even the superabundant "nature" the Europeans inherited had been
largely put in place by these now absent gardeners, and had run wild only
after they had ceased to cull and harvest it.

In the end, the loss to us all was incalculable. As Mann writes, "Having
grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel
ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries
and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or
characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The
simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an
intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian
societies had survived in full splendor!"

Kevin Baker is the author of the forthcoming historical novel "Strivers
Row."