CREATIVE DESTRUCTION (via Mike Daley):

New World, Old Myths: A review of Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Bruce S. Thornton, Private Papers)

Mann for the most part successfully recovers that truth, giving us a portrait of New World Indians that restores their agency and humanity, and thus rescues them from their pathetic status as the victims of a marauding, uniquely evil European civilization. Mann writes about science for the Atlantic Monthly, and his book is typical of most science books addressed to non-scientists. The discussions and explanations of scientific controversies are interlarded with personal anecdotes about the author, scholars, researchers, and various other people he meets on his research journeys. But despite these chatty distractions, he manages to discuss pretty clearly and fairly three key controversial ideas about the conditions of pre-contact American Indian life, even if his conclusions are not always convincing.

The first concerns the population of the Americas when the Europeans first arrived. How many Indians were alive before they encountered the strange and deadly diseases the Europeans brought with them? This is a highly charged political issue for those who see Columbus and his successors as genocidal racists. Mann takes his readers through the decades of research and the arguments for and against the higher and lower estimates, as well as the politicized issue of assigning blame for the deaths and characterizing them as "genocide." In the 1920s, estimates put the population of the entire hemisphere at 40 or 50 million; 20 years later, the guess was a fifth that number. He tells us that today the "High Counters" are winning the debate, but he doesn't provide a number. He does endorse Henry Dobyns's estimate of 90-112 million, but nothing in his discussion makes this estimate convincing. Part of the problem, he writes, is to figure out where all these people went, given how few Indians were left by the 17th century; in central Mexico , for example, there were fewer than a million.

One solution is to posit astronomical mortality rates, such as 95%, for the diseases the Indians caught from Europeans. But such mortality rates from disease are very unusual. The Black Death killed a third of its victims, the 1918 flu epidemic 5%. These low mortality rates make evolutionary sense, since a disease that kills almost all its victims dooms itself. One explanation for these estimated high rates is a genetic vulnerability that afflicted New World Indians and left them uniquely vulnerable to disease — a lack of variety in the human leukocyte antigens, which help the body fight off various pathogens. But this explanation, while promising, is still speculative. Given the margins of error that compromise pre-contact population estimates, and the questionable reliability of sources contemporary with the Indians, we still can't say with much certainty what the Indian population was at the time of European contact.

The second issue Mann discusses is the evidence that pre-contact Indian societies were "older, grander, and more complex" than the primitive hunters and gatherers of earlier descriptions. Support for this view comes from recent research that pushes the Indians' presence in the New World to 20,000 or even 30,000 years before the present instead of 14,000 or 15,000. This added time allows for more generations of people, supporting the population estimates of the "High Counters," and also provides extra time for developing more sophisticated civilizations. Mann surveys the recent archaeological discoveries of irrigation works, textile production, writing systems, calendars, roads, pottery, the domestication of cotton and maize (the latter something of a miracle, given how little the Indians had to work with), and even in the Peruvian Andes a "great wall" made of stone and stretching for 40 miles. All these remains testify to a level of civilization far beyond the old picture, painted by Indian idealizer and demonizer alike, of Indians as primitive hunters and gatherers indistinguishable from their natural environments.

On the contrary, pre-contact Indians were builders of many more urban centers and complex societies than just those created by the Mexica (Aztecs) and Inca. In North America, for example, the Cahokia chiefdom near modern St. Louis was the greatest city north of the Río Grande between 950 and 1250 A.D., with a population of 15,000. Its huge mounds are still visible today, the largest 900 feet long, 650 feet wide, and 20 tall. Fronting it was a plaza 1,000 feet long. As Mann observes, "[a] thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape."

But the sophistication of Indian cultures, in addition to their greater numbers, creates a problem for the third controversial notion — and one of the most cherished myths of Indian idealizers — that they were natural ecologists, harmonizing with the natural world, and "living lightly on the land." When many millions of people create cities and domesticate plants and animals, they necessarily affect their environment much more extensively than would hunters and gatherers or rude farmers. Mann surveys the evidence and finds that, like humans everywhere, Indians shaped and transformed their surroundings in various ways: "At the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere had been thoroughly painted with the human brush."

The most important tool used by Indians to shape their environment was fire. It cleared space for farming, drove herds during hunts, promoted useful plant and animal species, and even served as entertainment: Rocky Mountain tribes entertained Lewis and Clark "by applying torches to sap-dripping fir trees, which then exploded like Roman candles." The Great Plains is mostly an artifact of Indian burning, and the presence of bison in the East was due to the Indians, who burned off forests and thus created a landscape more suitable for bison. Even the vast Amazonian rainforest, "[f]ar from being the timeless, million-year-old wilderness portrayed on calendars," is in fact "the product of a historical interaction between the environment and human beings." As much as an eighth of the Amazon forest was created by humans who nurtured plants like the peach palm, bacuri, and açai. They even invented dirt: terra preta, a nutrient-rich soil produced by mixing charcoal and organic refuse with earth, helped their orchards grow.

Indeed, some of the icons of America 's supposedly pristine wilderness were in fact the consequence of the Europeans' presence, which disrupted the resource management techniques the Indians had developed over the centuries. The endless flocks of passenger pigeons celebrated and mourned by John Muir and James Fenimore Cooper were the result of fewer Indians. So too with the bison herds, which flourished in the ecological space once occupied by Indians whose number had been diminished by disease. So too with the "forest primeval" admired by American Romantics. All were part of the new environment that came into being after Indian numbers plummeted and the landscape they had crafted and tended over the centuries began to alter. As Mann concludes, "Far from destroying pristine wilderness…Europeans bloodily created it."

At the end of the day, all that matters is that they were uncivilized.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 6, 2006 9:44 AM