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Hello, Columbus

Charles C. Mann gives pre-Columbian Indian cultures their due without mythologizing their achievements.

By BILL DURYEA
Published August 21, 2005

1491:

New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

By Charles C. Mann

Knopf, $30, 471 pp

If one were to summarize several centuries of academic thinking about what the Americas looked like before Columbus arrived, it might sound something like this:

There weren't that many Indians. The Indians who did live in the Americas weren't really natives - they'd sneaked in the back door from somewhere else. They hadn't been here that long before Columbus arrived, and anyway, they didn't do much with the place.

Some serious agendas underlay these dismissive generalizations. If Indians weren't that numerous, then their displacement would be less noteworthy. If they were recent blow-ins from Asia, that made them immigrants just like the European settlers. If they had done nothing but forage and fight, then they couldn't really be called civilized.

George Bancroft, the pre-eminent U.S. historian of his day, neatly tied up these disparaging ideas in 1834 when he described the Americas before Columbus' arrival as "an unproductive waste. . . . Its only inhabitants were a few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce or political connection."

Even when historians tried to make amends, they ended up slighting the Indians. In the 1960s it became fashionable to celebrate the Indians for their harmonious existence with nature; they lived so lightly on the land they scarcely left a trace, the thinking went. But this compliment had a patronizing undertone by failing to recognize the Indians' ability to tame their environment to suit their needs. In fact, they made liberal use of massive fires in the autumn to clear underbrush and dead prairie grass, thereby improving crop yields and hunting grounds.

Taken together, these persistent misunderstandings of the historical record had the effect of omitting the residents of the Americas (north, south and in between) from the Neolithic Revolution that includes Sumer between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; Egyptians along the Nile; the Yalu River in China and the Indus River in India.

This was the history that Charles C. Mann absorbed as a schoolboy. As an acclaimed magazine and book writer, he would discover many researchers were challenging these assumptions.

"I kept waiting for the book to appear," Mann writes by way of explaining the genesis of his own interest. "The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned."

1491 is Mann's eminently evenhanded and engaging effort to gather the feuding scholars together in one ring and let them duke it out. It's evident whom he's rooting for, but he's not interested in producing a book that throws haymakers to please the crowd. He's sympathetic to those who view the Americas in the 15th century as teeming with humanity - 112-million inhabitants when Columbus arrived, by one estimate, more than Europe at the time. But he doesn't ignore the scholars who deride the "high-counters" for inventing numbers to suit their liberal, anti-imperialist politics.

This is all good sport and entertaining for a reader who wants a ringside seat in a very current and evolving dispute. Mann's color commentary sets the right tone: scholarly but hip. He describes a massive mound built toward the end of the first millennium along the Mississippi as a proud "shout-out to the world." Thousands of Amazonian Indians waving palm fronds along a river bank created "a kind of football wave." In style, Mann has much in common with Jared Diamond, who has scored bestsellers with his sweeping studies of the growth and decline of world civilizations.

Mann is assiduous about giving proper due to inventions of pre-Columbian Americans. For too long, historians have attempted to explain away the demonstrable achievements.

Inventions that would change the course of human history arose in the Americas simultaneously to or before their development in other parts of the world. For example, the use of zero, which revolutionized mathematics, was documented on a Maya carving from the 4th century A.D. Eight hundred years later, the Catholic church would still be denouncing the use of zero as "foreign and un-Christian."

But Mann is careful to avoid the same trap as the historians who seem to want to mythologize the Indians' achievements. He notes that "Olmec, Maya and other Mesoamerican societies were world pioneers in mathematics and astronomy - but they did not use the wheel. They had invented it, but they did not employ it for any purpose other than children's toys."

One of the most instructive episodes of the book is Mann's recounting of the demise of the Inca empire at the hands of Francisco Pizzaro, the Spanish conquistador.

Decades before Pizzaro's arrival in the Andes in 1532, the Incas had created the largest empire in the world, "bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia . . . bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire . . . bigger by far than any European state," Mann writes. Although the Incas had no currency or even markets, trade moved freely in the empire. The Incas even "managed to eradicate hunger," Mann writes.

And yet, in one afternoon, Nov. 16, 1532, in the town of Cajamarca, 168 Spaniards with 62 horses toppled the Inca empire without suffering a single casualty.

Pizarro, bent on plundering the Incas' treasure, hid his well-armed soldiers - many of whom who were so scared they urinated on themselves - in buildings around the town square, waiting for the Incan leader Atawallpa and his thousands of soldiers. When the Incas were massed before him, Pizarro ordered his men to charge into the square firing.

"The Indians were so panicked by the smoke and fire and steel and charging animals that in trying to flee hundreds trampled each other to death," Mann writes. Atawallpa was taken hostage and later killed. Forty years of warfare ensued before the Spanish finally subjugated the Incas.

In some respects, however, the ultimate conquest had been assured before Pizarro had ever arrived. Eight years before the slaughter at Cajamarca, a smallpox epidemic decimated the Incas. Lacking any natural immunity to or experience in combating the disease "radiated through society like ink spreading through tissue paper," Mann writes. The society became so destabilized that civil war erupted.

"The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated," Mann writes, quoting the groundbreaking anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns. This depopulation made conquest possible.

"Much of the world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation," Mann writes. "So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew the world had existed."

-- Bill Duryea is a Times staff writer.

[Last modified August 20, 2005, 11:16:03]