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of which made their way into this updated and corrected edition. Some book reviewers, too, drew my attention to errors, which I have tried to fix. For this help, I thank T. Chad Amos, David B. Bieler, Alfred W. Crosby, Todd Follansbee, Daniel W. Gade, Berl Golomb, Bob Hart, Bruce Johansen, Jeff Kellem, Elias Levy, Barbara Mann, William H. McNeill, Daniel N. Paul, Victor Sanchez, Jeffrey Shallit, Ted Slusarczyk, Michael M. Smith, Rev. Steve Thom, Rick Uyesugi, and Ronald Wright. I am sure I have left out some names—not until relatively late in the process did I begin keeping records. A couple of people read all or part of the published book a second time after having read it a first time in manuscript. One of these gluttons for punishment, Frances Karttunen, gave my Nahuatl orthography a second critique (it is still imperfect, but I hope improved); I also profited from her other insights. William Denevan, too, went through everything again with blue pencil in hand. I am indebted to both. A number of bloggers weighed in, for which my especial thanks to James Hannam (Venerable Bede), Chris Price (Layman) and Laura Gjovaag (Tegan).

My gratitude to the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, which, under the direction of Antoinette WinklerPrins and Narciso Barrera Bassols, organized a special panel on 1491 at their annual congress in Michoacán, Mexico. On the panel were William Doolittle, Suzanna Hecht, George Lovell, Billie Lee Turner, William I. Woods, and again William Denevan. Through the auspices of Jerry Dobson (to whom my thanks) the proceedings will be published in the Geographical Review. Finally, I am saddened to note that just before this book appeared the archaeologist Jim Petersen, whom I had come to consider a friend, was murdered during a stupid robbery in the Amazon. I hope that in a small way this book reflects the infectious delight he took in unveiling the human story, and in explaining his discoveries—and those of his colleagues—to anyone who wanted to learn.

APPENDIX A

Loaded Words

Anyone who attempts to write or even speak about the original inhabitants of the Americas quickly runs into terminological quicksand. And the attempt to extricate writer and reader by being logical and sensitive often ends with both parties sucked deeper into the mire. The difficulties fall into two broad categories: names for individual groups of Indians, and names for social categories used to classify those groups. Most well known among the former is “Indian,” a term so long recognized as absurd that in the 1960s and 1970s social scientists moved to change it to “Native American” or, sometimes, “Amerindian.”

The change was well meaning, but not entirely successful. On a literal level, the replacement name is as problematic as the original. “Native American” is intended to refer to the peoples who inhabited the Americas before Columbus arrived and their descendants today. Literally, though, it means something else: as the activist Russell Means has complained, “Anyone born in the western hemisphere is a Native American.” Worse, the term introduces an entirely new set of confusions. “Indian” does not refer to the Inuit, Aleut, and other peoples of the far north, whose cultures, languages, and even physical appearance are so different from their neighbors to the south that researchers generally argue they must have come to the Americas in a separate, much later wave of migration (though still many centuries ahead of Columbus). But all of them are Native Americans, which eliminates a distinction found useful by both scholars and indigenous peoples themselves.

In conversation, every native person whom I have met (I think without exception) has used “Indian” rather than “Native American.” One day I said “Native American” when speaking to a Bolivian graduate student of indigenous descent. She shook her head dismissively at the phrase. “Aquí somos indios,” she explained. “Los ‘americanos nativos’ viven solamente en los Estados Unidos.” We are Indians here. “Native Americans” live only in the United States. “I abhor