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Remember Squanto? Maybe you encountered him in
a school pageant or in a children's story book: he's the "friendly Indian" who
brought corn to the
Pilgrims, saving them from winter starvation and kicking off the very first
Thanksgiving feast. For all those who ever wanted to hear more about Squanto,
there's a fascinating section of 1491 that tells his story. He was more
than a bit-part player shuffled onto the stage, corncobs in hand, to further the
Pilgrims' progress.
Squanto was an abductee, kidnapped by sailors and sold into slavery in Europe.
He spoke English fluently because he'd been a living conversation piece in the
parlors of London. By the time he managed to make it back to his native
Massachusetts years later, his people had been nearly obliterated by European
diseases. Becoming Plymouth Colony's guardian angel was his way of making a new
home for himself and of gaining allies against his surviving Native enemies. His
story is a lot richer and more complicated than the grade school pageants would
lead us to suspect.
And that's the major theme of Charles C. Mann's 1491: the pre-contact
Americas were much more than what we learned in history class. Drawing on
ground-breaking research from the past two decades, Mann, an award-winning
science writer and journalist, offers a series of surprising snapshots of the
pre-Columbian world. He covers three main subjects, describing an America with
much larger native populations than has long been thought; outlining an emerging
scientific consensus that Indians came to the Americas thousands of years
earlier than popularly believed; and explaining how native peoples profoundly
changed the environments in which they lived by burning grasslands, building
highways and cities, developing innovative farming techniques, and spreading -
and in the
case of corn, even creating - useful plant species.
The picture that emerges is one that moves beyond the hoary notions of "the
first immigrants" or "the environmentalist Indian." Mann instead offers a broad
survey of indigenous scientific advances, fractious local politics, and the
vastly diverse ways that natives structured their societies. To explain European
explorers' often confusing estimates of Indian populations, Mann delves into the
intriguing realm of infectious disease and explains how current theories in
epidemiology account for the mass destruction of Indian communities by smallpox
and other diseases. It's among the most intriguing sections of his already
fascinating book.
This book will be of interest to fans of popular anthropology in works like
Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire or Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs,
and Steel, and it's simply a must-read for those interested in Native
America or in environmental histories by the likes of Donald Worster or William
Cronin. More than a collection of surprising facts, theories, and discoveries,
1491 explodes the idea that Native Americans had no history before the
arrival of Europeans, and it is an excellent introduction to the many American
societies that gave the world not only corn and cranberries but also, to
paraphrase Mann, more than a thousand different ways of being human.
Review by Mark Bradshaw, November 24, 2005
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