{"product_id":"1491-second-edition-isbn-9781400032051","title":"1491 (Second Edition)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review).\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eContrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eList of Maps\u003cbr\u003ePreface\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eINTRODUCTION  \/ \u003ci\u003eHolmberg’s Mistake\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e1. A View from Above\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART ONE    \/  \u003ci\u003eNumbers from Nowhere?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e2.  Why Billington Survived\u003cbr\u003e3.  In the Land of Four Quarters\u003cbr\u003e4.  Frequently Asked Questions\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART TWO   \/   \u003ci\u003eVery Old Bones\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e5.  Pleistocene Wars\u003cbr\u003e6.  Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)\u003cbr\u003e7.  Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART THREE     \/ \u003ci\u003e Landscape with Figures\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e8.  Made in America\u003cbr\u003e9.  Amazonia\u003cbr\u003e10. The Artificial Wilderness\u003cbr\u003e11. The Great Law of Peace\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAppendixes\u003cbr\u003eA. Loaded Words\u003cbr\u003eB. Talking Knots\u003cbr\u003eC. The Syphilis Exception\u003cbr\u003eD. Calendar Math\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments\u003cbr\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eBibliography\u003cbr\u003eIndex\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A journalistic masterpiece.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Marvelous.... A sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus.... A remarkably engaging writer.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Fascinating.... A landmark of a book that drops ingrained images of colonial American into the dustbin, one after the other.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A ripping, man-on-the-ground tour of a world most of us barely intuit.... An exhilarating shift in perspective.... \u003ci\u003e1491\u003c\/i\u003e erases our myth of a wilderness Eden. It replaces that fallacy with evidence of a different genesis, exciting and closer to true.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Cleveland Plain Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mann tells a powerful, provocative and important story.... \u003ci\u003e1491\u003c\/i\u003e vividly compels us to re-examine how we teach the ancient history of the Americas and how we live with the environmental consequences of colonization.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Engagingly written and utterly absorbing.... Part detective story, part epic and part tragedy.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Miami Herald\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Provocative.... A Jared Diamond-like volley that challenges prevailing thinking about global development. Mann has chronicled an important shift in our vision of world development, one out young children could end up studying in their text books when they reach junior high.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—San Francisco Chronicle\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Marvelous.... A revelation.... Our concept of pure wilderness untouched by grubby human hands must now be jettisoned.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The New York Sun\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Monumental.... Mann slips in so many fresh, new interpretations of American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Salon\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Concise and brilliantly entertaining.... Reminiscent of John McPhee's eloquence with scientific detail.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Los Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCHARLES C. MANN, a correspondent for \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic, Science,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eWired,\u003c\/i\u003e has written for \u003ci\u003eFortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post,\u003c\/i\u003e as well as for the TV network HBO and the series \u003ci\u003eLaw \u0026amp; Order\u003c\/i\u003e. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he is the recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His \u003ci\u003e1491\u003c\/i\u003e won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhy Billington Survived\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTHE FRIENDLY INDIAN\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn March 22, 1621, an official Native American delegation walked  through what is now southern New England to negotiate with a group of  foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. At  the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate: Massasoit, the sachem  (political-military leader) of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose  coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of what is now  southeastern Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the  north; and Tisquantum, a distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had  reluctantly brought along as an interpreter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMassasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced would have  tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had  fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been  depopulated—indeed, the foreigners ahead now occupied one of the empty  sites. It was all he could do to hold together the remnants of his  people. Adding to his problems, the disaster had not touched the  Wampanoag’s longtime enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west.  Soon, Massasoit feared, they would take advantage of the Wampanoag’s  weakness and overrun them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDesperate threats require desperate countermeasures. In a gamble,  Massasoit intended to abandon, even reverse, a long-standing policy.  Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century. Shorter  than the natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably dirty, the pallid  foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of the masks of  bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were  irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often  surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks.  But they also made useful and beautiful goods—copper kettles,  glittering colored glass, and steel knives and hatchets—unlike anything  else in New England. Moreover, they would exchange these valuable items  for cheap furs of the sort used by Indians as blankets. It was like  happening upon a dingy kiosk that would swap fancy electronic goods for  customers’ used socks—almost anyone would be willing to overlook the  shopkeeper’s peculiarities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver time, the Wampanoag, like other native societies in coastal New  England, had learned how to manage the European presence. They  encouraged the exchange of goods, but would only allow their visitors  to stay ashore for brief, carefully controlled excursions. Those who  overstayed their welcome were forcefully reminded of the limited  duration of Indian hospitality. At the same time, the Wampanoag fended  off Indians from the interior, preventing them from trading directly  with the foreigners. In this way the shoreline groups put themselves in  the position of classic middlemen, overseeing both European access to  Indian products and Indian access to European products. Now Massasoit  was visiting a group of British with the intent of changing the rules.  He would permit the newcomers to stay for an unlimited time—provided  that they formally allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTisquantum, the interpreter, had shown up alone at Massasoit’s home a  year and a half before. He spoke fluent English, because he had lived  for several years in Britain. But Massasoit didn’t trust him. He seems  to have been in Massasoit’s eyes a man without anchor, out for himself.  In a conflict, Tisquantum might even side with the foreigners.  Massasoit had kept Tisquantum in a kind of captivity since his arrival,  monitoring his actions closely. And he refused to use him to negotiate  with the colonists until he had another, independent means of  communication with them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat March Samoset—the third member of the triumvirate—appeared, having  hitched a ride from his home in Maine on an English ship that was  plying the coast. Not known is whether his arrival was due to chance or  if Massasoit had asked him to come down because he had picked up a few  English phrases by trading with the British. In any case, Massasoit  first had sent Samoset, rather than Tisquantum, to the foreigners.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSamoset had walked unaccompanied and unarmed into the circle of rude  huts in which the British were living on March 17, 1621. The colonists  saw a robust, erect-postured man wearing only a loincloth; his straight  black hair was shaved in front but flowed down his shoulders behind. To  their further amazement, this almost naked man greeted them in broken  but understandable English. He left the next morning with a few  presents. A day later he came back, accompanied by five “tall proper  men”—the phrase is the colonist Edward Winslow’s—with three-inch black  stripes painted down the middle of their faces. The two sides talked  inconclusively, each warily checking out the other, for a few hours.  Five days later, on the 22nd, Samoset showed up again at the  foreigners’ ramshackle base, this time with Tisquantum. Meanwhile  Massasoit and the rest of the Indian company waited out of sight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSamoset and Tisquantum spoke with the colonists for about an hour.  Perhaps they then gave a signal. Or perhaps Massasoit was simply  following a schedule. In any case, he and the rest of the Indian party  appeared without warning at the crest of a hill on the south bank of  the creek that ran through Patuxet. Alarmed by Massasoit’s sudden  entrance, the settlers withdrew to the hill on the opposite bank, where  they had emplaced their few cannons behind a half-finished stockade. A  standoff ensued.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinally Winslow exhibited the decisiveness that later led to his  selection as colony governor. Wearing a full suit of armor and carrying  a sword, he waded through the stream and offered himself as a hostage.  Tisquantum, who walked with him, served as interpreter. Massasoit’s  brother took charge of Winslow and then Massasoit crossed the water  himself followed by Tisquantum and twenty of Massasoit’s men, all  ostentatiously unarmed. The colonists took the sachem to an unfinished  house and gave him some cushions to recline on. Both sides shared some  of the foreigners’ homemade moonshine, then settled down to talk,  Tisquantum translating.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo the colonists, Massasoit could be distinguished from his subjects  more by manner than by dress or ornament. He wore the same deerskin  shawls and leggings and like his fellows had covered his face with  bug-repelling oil and reddish-purple dye. Around his neck hung a pouch  of tobacco, a long knife, and a thick chain of the prized white shell  beads called wampum. In appearance, Winslow wrote afterward, he was “a  very lusty man, in his best years, an able body, grave of countenance,  and spare of speech.” The Europeans, who had barely survived the  previous winter, were in much worse shape. Half of the original colony  now lay underground beneath wooden markers painted with death’s heads;  most of the survivors were malnourished.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTheir meeting was a critical moment in American history. The foreigners  called their colony Plymouth; they themselves were the famous  Pilgrims.* As schoolchildren learn, at that meeting the Pilgrims  obtained the services of Tisquantum, usually known as “Squanto.” In the  1970s, when I attended high school, a popular history text was America:  Its People and Values, by Leonard C. Wood, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Edward  L. Biller. Nestled among colorful illustrations of colonial life was a  succinct explanation of Tisquantum’s role:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them  how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A  soldier, Captain Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend  themselves against unfriendly Indians.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that  Tisquantum had demonstrated the proper maize-planting  technique—sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by  beans and squash that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks.  And he told the Pilgrims to fertilize the soil by burying fish  alongside the maize seeds, a traditional native technique for producing  a bountiful harvest. Following this advice, my teacher said, the  colonists grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the  first Thanksgiving. In our slipshod fashion, we students took notes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story in \u003ci\u003eAmerica: Its People and Values\u003c\/i\u003e isn’t wrong, so far as it  goes. But the impression it gives is entirely misleading.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTisquantum was critical to the colony’s survival, contemporary scholars  agree. He moved to Plymouth after the meeting and spent the rest of his  life there. Just as my teacher said, Tisquantum told the colonists to  bury several small fish in each maize hill, a procedure followed by  European settlers for the next two centuries. Squanto’s teachings,  Winslow concluded, led to “a good increase of Indian corn”—the  difference between success and starvation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWinslow didn’t know that fish fertilizer may not have been an age-old  Indian custom, but a recent invention—if it was an Indian practice at  all. So little evidence has emerged of Indians fertilizing with fish  that some archaeologists believe that Tisquantum actually picked up the  idea from European farmers. The notion is not as ridiculous as it may  seem. Tisquantum had learned English because British sailors had  kidnapped him seven years before. To return to the Americas, he in  effect had to escape twice—once from Spain, where his captors initially  sold him into slavery, and once from England, to which he was smuggled  from Spain, and where he served as a kind of living conversation piece  at a rich man’s house. In his travels, Tisquantum stayed in places  where Europeans used fish as fertilizer, a practice on the Continent  since medieval times.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSkipping over the complex course of Tisquantum’s life is understandable  in a textbook with limited space. But the omission is symptomatic of  the complete failure to consider Indian motives, or even that Indians  might have motives. The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was  successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off  the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New  England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the  survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of  British immigration to New England. All of this was absent not only  from my high school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they were  based on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis variant of Holmberg’s Mistake dates back to the Pilgrims  themselves, who ascribed the lack of effective native resistance to the  will of God. “Divine providence,” the colonist Daniel Gookin wrote,  favored “the quiet and peaceable settlement of the English.” Later  writers tended to attribute European success not to European deities  but to European technology. In a contest where only one side had rifles  and cannons, historians said, the other side’s motives were irrelevant.  By the end of the nineteenth century, the Indians of the Northeast were  thought of as rapidly fading background details in the saga of the rise  of the United States—“marginal people who were losers in the end,” as  James Axtell of the College of William and Mary dryly put it in an  interview. Vietnam War–era denunciations of the Pilgrims as imperialist  or racist simply replicated the error in a new form. Whether the cause  was the Pilgrim God, Pilgrim guns, or Pilgrim greed, native losses were  foreordained; Indians could not have stopped colonization, in this  view, and they hardly tried.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeginning in the 1970s, Axtell, Neal Salisbury, Francis Jennings, and  other historians grew dissatisfied with this view. “Indians were seen  as trivial, ineffectual patsies,” Salisbury, a historian at Smith  College, told me. “But that assumption—a whole continent of  patsies—simply didn’t make sense.” These researchers tried to peer  through the colonial records to the Indian lives beneath. Their work  fed a tsunami of inquiry into the interactions between natives and  newcomers in the era when they faced each other as relative equals. “No  other field in American history has grown as fast,” marveled Joyce  Chaplin, a Harvard historian, in 2003.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fall of Indian societies had everything to do with the natives  themselves, researchers argue, rather than being religiously or  technologically determined. (Here the claim is not that indigenous  cultures should be blamed for their own demise but that they helped to  determine their own fates.) “When you look at the historical record,  it’s clear that Indians were trying to control their own destinies,”  Salisbury said. “And often enough they succeeded”—only to learn, as all  peoples do, that the consequences were not what they expected.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis chapter and the next will explore how two different Indian  societies, the Wampanoag and the Inka, reacted to the incursions from  across the sea. It may seem odd that a book about Indian life before  contact should devote space to the period after contact, but there are  reasons for it. First, colonial descriptions of Native Americans are  among the few glimpses we have of Indians whose lives were not shaped  by the presence of Europe. The accounts of the initial encounters  between Indians and Europeans are windows into the past, even if the  glass is smeared and distorted by the chroniclers’ prejudices and  misapprehensions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSecond, although the stories of early contact—the Wampanoag with the  British, the Inka with the Spanish—are as dissimilar as their  protagonists, many archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have  recently come to believe that they have deep commonalities. And the  tales of other Indians’ encounters with the strangers were alike in the  same way. From these shared features, researchers have constructed what  might be thought of as a master narrative of the meeting of Europe and  America. Although it remains surprisingly little known outside  specialist circles, this master narrative illuminates the origins of  every nation in the Americas today. More than that, the effort to  understand events after Columbus shed unexpected light on critical  aspects of life before Columbus. Indeed, the master narrative led to  such surprising conclusions about Native American societies before the  arrival of Europeans that it stirred up an intellectual firestorm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCOMING OF AGE IN THE DAWNLAND\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eConsider Tisquantum, the “friendly Indian” of the textbook. More than  likely Tisquantum was not the name he was given at birth. In that part  of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of  manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal  Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and  identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his  hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God. No one would lightly adopt  such a name in contemporary Western society. Neither would anyone in  seventeenth-century indigenous society. Tisquantum was trying to  project something.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTisquantum was not an Indian. True, he belonged to that category of  people whose ancestors had inhabited the Western Hemisphere for  thousands of years. And it is true that I refer to him as an Indian,  because the label is useful shorthand; so would his descendants, and  for much the same reason. But “Indian” was not a category that  Tisquantum himself would have recognized, any more than the inhabitants  of the same area today would call themselves “Western Hemisphereans.”  Still less would Tisquantum have claimed to belong to “Norumbega,” the  label by which most Europeans then referred to New England. (“New  England” was coined only in 1616.) As Tisquantum’s later history made  clear, he regarded himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet,  a shoreline settlement halfway between what is now Boston and the  beginning of Cape Cod.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePatuxet was one of the dozen or so settlements in what is now eastern  Massachusetts and Rhode Island that comprised the Wampanoag  confederation. In turn, the Wampanoag were part of a tripartite  alliance with two other confederations: the Nauset, which comprised  some thirty groups on Cape Cod; and the Massachusett, several dozen  villages clustered around Massachusetts Bay. All of these people spoke  variants of Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language family,  the biggest in eastern North America at the time. (Massachusett was the  name both of a language and of one of the groups that spoke it.) In  Massachusett, the name for the New England shore was the Dawnland, the  place where the sun rose. The inhabitants of the Dawnland were the  People of the First Light.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302062903525,"sku":"NP9781400032051","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400032051.jpg?v=1767720179","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/1491-second-edition-isbn-9781400032051","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}