Mann wrote his book for a general audience, basing his conclusions on interviews, his own observations as well as the scholarly literature, and many of his findings will be familiar to academic historians.
As this summation suggests, Mann's work is very broad in scope, ranging in time and space from Ice Age Beringia to twentieth-century Amazonia and drawing on the secondary literature in history, anthropology, and archaeology. In three sections, Mann skillfully develops these broad points, synthesizing decades of scholarly work on pre-Columbian population numbers the impact of Old World pathogens, plants, and animals Ice Age migrations the formation and collapse of complex societies in North America, Mesoamerica, and South America and other topics.
And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly marked by humankind" (p. Indians were here far longer than previously thought. According to Mann, the history he and millions of others were taught was "wrong in almost every aspect. Mann's wide-ranging and well-written book is an effort to debunk a series of myths about pre-Columbian America. Reviewed by Michael LaCombe (Department of History, Adelphi University)Īt bottom, Charles C.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.
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