1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [286]
—BusinessWeek
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2006
Copyright © 2005, 2006 by Charles C. Mann
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this book have appeared in different forms in The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Design Magazine, Journal of the Southwest, The New York Times, and Science.
Insert credits (clockwise left to right): Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; Central Cahokia circa AD 1150–1200 (detail) by Lloyd K. Townsend courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site; photograph of chicha seller in Cuzco (detail), 1921, by Martín Chambi courtesy of Julia Chambi and Teo Allain Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi, Cusco, Peru; Community Life at Cahokia (detail) by Michael Hampshire courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site; Ruins in Machu Picchu © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; The Grolier Codex (detail), photograph © Justin Kerr; reed boat (detail) © Paul Harmon, Qala Yampu Project, www.reedboat.org; photograph of Inka ruin Wiñay Wayna (detail) by Martín Chambi courtesy of Julia Chambi and Teo Allain Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi, Cusco, Peru; Landrace maize from Oaxaca (detail) © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of smallpox (detail) from the Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, vol. 4, book 12, plate 114 by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún/Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: 1491: new revelations of the Americas before Columbus / Charles C. Mann.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Indians—Origin. 2. Indians—History. 3. Indians—Antiquities. 4. America—Antiquities.
I. Title.
E61.m266 2005
970.01'1—dc22 2004061547
eISBN-13: 978-0-307-27818-0
eISBN-10: 0-307-27818-2
Author photograph © J.D. Sloan
www.vintagebooks.com
v1.0
*1 According to Joseph Conrad, the violence was of culinary origin. “The Noble Red Man was a mighty hunter,” explained the great novelist, “but his wives had not mastered the art of conscientious cookery—and the consequences were deplorable. The Seven Nations around the Great Lakes and the Horse tribes of the plains were but one vast prey to raging dyspepsia.” Because their lives were blighted by “the morose irritability which follows the consumption of ill-cooked food,” they were continually prone to quarrels.
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*2 In the United States and parts of Europe the name is “corn.” I use “maize” because Indian maize—multicolored and mainly eaten after drying and grinding—is strikingly unlike the sweet, yellow, uniform kernels usually evoked in North America by the name “corn.” In Britain, “corn” can mean the principal cereal crop in a region—oats in Scotland, for example, are sometimes referred to by the term.
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*3 The Mayflower passengers are often called “Puritans,” but they disliked the name. Instead they used terms like “separatists,” because they separated themselves from the Church of England, or “saints,” because their church, patterned on the early Christian church, was the “church of saints.” “Pilgrims” is the title preferred by the Society of Mayflower Descendants.
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*4 The first Europeans known to have reached the Americas were the Vikings, who appeared off eastern Canada in the tenth century. Their short-lived venture had no known effect on native life. Other European groups may also have arrived before Columbus, but they, too, had no well-substantiated impact on the people they visited.
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*5 These preposterous tales may actually be true; other amazing Smith stories certainly are. While Smith was establishing a colony at Jamestown,