1491

The familiar picture of the Americas before 1492 is of a thinly peopled wilderness: small bands who crossed the Bering land bridge about 13,000 years ago and left the land much as they found it. In 1491, science journalist Charles C. Mann gathers the research that has unsettled much of that account.

Mann sets out the case that Indigenous populations were far larger than once believed, possibly larger than Europe's, with cities that rivalled London and Paris; that people arrived earlier and in more than one wave; and that Norte Chico in Peru and the early societies of Mesoamerica rank among the world's oldest independent centres of civilization, older than the Egyptian pyramids.

He looks at Andean farming and the Inca, the breeding of maize, and evidence that peoples of the Amazon farmed and shaped the rain forest, largely with fire, so that the land Europeans found was not a wilderness at all.

The book opens in the Beni of Bolivia, where an anthropologist in the 1940s mistook the survivors of epidemics for people who had always lived that way, and it moves between Mesoamerica, the Andes, the Amazon and seventeenth-century New England. Mann is clear about where scholars still disagree. First published by Knopf in 2005, it won the 2006 National Academies Communication Award and was followed by a companion volume, 1493.