I just finished “1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” (Charles C. Mann) last night and I am still trying to re-arrange what I thought I knew to accommodate what it has to say.
In short, the canonical view of the Indians — the people who lived in the Americas before the Europeans arrived to stay — as primitive, nomadic, subsistence-level people who existed outside history, who made no effort to extract a living from the land, who were passive creatures, no more aware than the animals, is wrong, wrong, wrong.
I can’t cite examples right now, my brain is too full and jumbled. But there is a growing consensus that the Americas were more populous than Europe and that complex civilizations may have emerged in this hemisphere before the Mesopotamian civilizations had formed.
Those buffalo that ran rampant across the prairies? They may well have been a cultivated food supply that got out of control when their chief predator — the Indians — was decimated by disease. The overwhelming variety of crops, fruits, and nuts in the Amazon basin? That whole region may have been an enormous orchard, all planted and cultivated.
Caveat: if you’re at all prone to liberal guilt, you might want to stay away from it. The idea that societies in this hemisphere had successfully built complex civilizations that effectively did away with hunger, with poverty, that so-called primitive people had terra-formed the Amazon from a vast basin of leached soils into a garden of plenty, and the arrival of Columbus destroyed it all might be too upsetting. The genetic engineering that gave us maize — what we call corn — may be the single greatest achievement in that field and we don’t even know how they did it.
I found it frustrating more than anything. Not all of the damage was wilful: diseases aren’t choosy about their victims. But there was plenty of greed and destruction — the burning of the Codexes that told the history of the Inka stands out — all the same.
A worthwhile read, to say the least.