Native Illusions

Salon reviews Charles C. Mann’s new book “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”. In the article reviewer Steve Kettmann sums up the effects of the book on his belief in the traditional Euro-centric narrative of the Americas before European settlement.

“What’s most shocking about “1491″ is the feeling it induces of waking up from a long dream and slowly realizing just how thoroughly one has been duped. We all knew there were problems with the old narrative of brave European settlers crossing the Atlantic to find an empty continent, but it’s jarring to discover, as Mann tells us, that in 1491 there were almost certainly more people living in the Americas than in Europe — and that, in many ways, American civilizations of the time were as advanced as anything across the ocean.”

The myths of scattered isolated tribes (who are portrayed as either noble savages or merely savage) is decimated in the book which presents a complex, advanced, populace people who had made advances in land management, class structure, and government that would take the European settlers generations to rival. Amazon.com reviewer Tom Nissley encapsulates some of the new information this book introduces.

“The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, unused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even “timeless” natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.”

In an interview about the book, author Charles C. Mann also debunks the origin of Kennewick Man

“Incidentally, there has been speculation that Kennewick Man was from Europe, largely based on an early reconstruction of his face that made him look a bit like the actor Patrick Stewart. More recent reconstructions based on better data have eliminated that resemblance. And in any case there is no evidence that I am aware of that solidly suggests a link to Europe-and lots of evidence against it, beginning with the fact that Indians are genetically linked with the peoples of Siberia.”

It becomes clear that if it were not for endemic disease striking the Native populations our history would be very different today. Casting away presumptions of how the native peoples of the Americas lived will not only help reshape how we consider their descendants today but on how we perceive our own “primitive” pasts.

Tags: Neopaganism