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Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

List of Maps

Preface

INTRODUCTION / Holmberg’s Mistake

1. A View from Above

PART ONE / Numbers from Nowhere?

2. Why Billington Survived

3. In the Land of Four Quarters

4. Frequently Asked Questions

PART TWO / Very Old Bones

5. Pleistocene Wars

6. Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)

7. Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II

PART THREE / Landscape with Figures

8. Made in America

9. Amazonia

10. The Artificial Wilderness

CODA

11. The Great Law of Peace

Afterword to the Vintage Edition

Appendixes

A. Loaded Words

B. Talking Knots

C. The Syphilis Exception

D. Calendar Math

Notes

Bibliography

Map Credits

Illustration Credits

Acknowledgments

Charles C. Mann 1491

Also by Charles C. Mann

Acclaim for Charles C. Mann’s 1491

Copyright

For the woman in the next-door office—

Cloudlessly, like everything else

—CCM

NATIVE AMERICA, 1491 A.D.

Native America, 1491 A.D.

Native America, 1000 A.D.

Massachusett Alliance, 1600 A.D.

Peoples of the Dawnland, 1600 A.D.

Tawantinsuyu: Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D.

Tawantinsuyu: Expansion of the Inka Empire, 1438–1527 A.D.

Triple Alliance, 1519 A.D.

Paleo-Indian Migration Routes: North America, 10,000 B.C.

Norte Chico: The Americas’ First Urban Complex, 3000–1800 B.C.

Mesoamerica, 1000 B.C.–1000 A.D.

Wari and Tiwanaku, 700 A.D.

Moundbuilders, 3400 B.C.–1400 A.D.

The American Bottom, 1300 A.D.

The Hundred Years’ War: Kaan and Mutal Battle to Control the Maya Heartland, 526–682 A.D.

Amazon Basin

Humanized Landscapes, 1491 A.D.

The seeds of this book date back, at least in part, to 1983, when I wrote an article for Science about a NASA program that was monitoring atmospheric ozone levels. In the course of learning about the program, I flew with a research team in a NASA plane equipped to sample and analyze the atmosphere at thirty thousand feet. At one point the group landed in Mérida, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. For some reason the scientists had the next day off, and we all took a decrepit Volkswagen van to the Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá. I knew nothing about Mesoamerican culture—I may not even have been familiar with the term “Mesoamerica,” which encompasses the area from central Mexico to Panama, including all of Guatemala and Belize, and parts of El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, the homeland of the Maya, the Olmec, and a host of other indigenous groups. Moments after we clambered out of the van I was utterly enthralled.

On my own—sometimes for vacation, sometimes on assignment—I returned to Yucatán five or six times, three times with my friend Peter Menzel, a photojournalist. For a German magazine, Peter and I made a twelve-hour drive down a terrible dirt road (thigh-deep potholes, blockades of fallen timber) to the then-unexcavated Maya metropolis of Calakmul. Accompanying us was Juan de la Cruz Briceño, Maya himself, caretaker of another, smaller ruin. Juan had spent twenty years as a chiclero, trekking the forest for weeks on end in search of chicle trees, which have a gooey sap that Indians have dried and chewed for millennia and that in the late nineteenth century became the base of the chewing-gum industry. Around a night fire he told us about the ancient, vine-shrouded cities he had stumbled across in his rambles, and his amazement when scientists informed him that his ancestors had built them. That night we slept in hammocks amid tall, headstone-like carvings that had not been read for more than a thousand years.

My interest in the peoples who walked the Americas before Columbus only snapped into anything resembling focus in the fall of 1992. By chance one Sunday afternoon I came across a display in a college library of the special Columbian quincentenary issue of the Annals of the Association