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 ced 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. Mann is well aware that much of the
history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of
pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that
often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the
most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among
the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact.
To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt
more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And
those who came later and found 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 other
diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population
without , which swept through the Americas faster 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 established 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
Great Pyramid at Giza
2650
32 First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention,
widely described as the most important mathematical 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 establish 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 Earth.
The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.
1492 The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.
Syphilis apparently 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
*Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville,
Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. **Courtesy Museum of Indian
Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia
General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1547-77).