1491 : : new Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Prepare yourself for repeated mind-blowing submitted by dave.wurtsmith on June 16, 2014, 3:08pm I don't think I've ever read anything that completely shifted my perception of the world as many times as '1491' did. In more ways than I can count, this book has fundamentally altered the way I think about the continent that I've lived on for my entire life, and the people who lived here before my own ancestors arrived, and how shamefully little I was taught about those first Americans in school and college.

I honestly had never given any thought at all to what Native Americans did with the 15,000 years between coming to North America and making contact with Europeans. I assumed, based on the fact that it had never been brought up, that they basically made war, gathered herbs, used every part of the buffalo, and basically didn't change single a thing about two entire continents for up to fifteen millennia.

Boy, I could not have been more wrong.

When Europeans first arrived in the New World, they kept going on and on in their early accounts about how green and fertile this new land was, how lush and full of game; almost like a garden, or a game preserve. WELL, THERE WAS A REASON FOR THAT. Native Americans, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, made enormous changes to their environments, mainly through the use of controlled burns to clear forests and create open fields which were attractive to game animals like deer and rabbits. In Mesoamerica, they built complex societies with advanced mathematics, architecture, and philosophy; in the Southwest, they built entire cities into the sides of cliffs; and in the northeast, the Iroquois League created a representative democracy which would later serve as the basis for the Constitution of the United States of America. The list of their accomplishments goes on and on.

This book comes with my highest recommendations. This book should be on the required reading list for every person who lives in the New World, or whose life has been affected by their discovery and colonization.

Almost Unreadable submitted by GJBarnett2 on July 10, 2017, 9:43am ... but an interesting idea. What were "the Americas" actually like just before that historical Demon, plunderer of the Earth, rapist, murderer and general not-so-nice-guy, Christopher Columbus, invaded the peaceful and prosperous, highly civilized, environmentally friendly, heavily populated "New World" and destroyed Eden? Deleting adjectives and adverbs, a fair question. Certainly fair to say that our cultural folklore about pre-Columbian peoples should occasionally get a fact-check in light of recent discoveries and theories but, unfortunately, as interesting as the subject matter may be, this book simply plods along at an unbearably slow pace. For example, an inquiry into how Pizarro was able to conquer the Inca Empire with only168 men and 64(?) horses breaks down over the minutiae of Incan culture and internal politics. It may have gotten better toward the end (see the prior review) but I just couldn't get that far. I could only read a few pages at a time (normally, BTW, I read over 1000 pages a week) and after putting this down in favor of something else several times, I just couldn't muster the interest to do it again.