good but not great | 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

book: 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus | Charles C. Mann

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	• 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Charles C. Mann Knopf, 2005 - 509 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Fascinating stuff

I do love reading history, and this one was totally readable. Most interesting.

good but not great

This is an informative, intelligent book. Up until the last two (short) sections, it is also intertaining. It should be read with a mental comparison to todays cities, people and environment. Think especially NEW ORLEANS. There is an error on page 251: "...my host...was melting water on her stove." What do you get when you melt water? I hope that the rest of the book was more accurate, but I did mostly enjoy the reading.

Amazon.com 1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-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 describe 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 stories 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 nature, 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.

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