“1491”: Discovering what Americas were like before Columbus.

By Bruce Ramsey; Special to The Seattle Times

“1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”

by Charles C. Mann

“The book has several main themes. One is that the population of Indians was larger, and their societies more accomplished, than was earlier believed. (Mann mostly calls them “Indian” because in most of the Americas that’s what they call themselves. “Native American,” he says, is exclusively a U.S. term.)

“The Indians surpassed the Europeans in some respects. The Incas’ cotton clothes were more comfortable than the Spaniards’ woollens and linens. In 1519, when Hernán Cortés’ men reached Tenochtitlán — now Mexico City — Mann says they “gawped like yokels” at a city larger and more splendid than Paris.

“The Indians met by the Pilgrims bathed regularly and noted that the Pilgrims did not; the Indians also let their kids play, while the Pilgrims put 7-year-olds to work. Not to quarrel with any of these statements, but in his eagerness to correct the idea that the Europeans were superior in all things, the author gives them credit in almost none.

“He does this even in the matter of the wheel, which the American civilizations knew for a thousand years and apparently used only for toys. He discounts this by saying that Europe struggled with an inefficient plow for 2,000 years before inventing a better one.

“Another theme of “1491” is that it is not true that the Indians lived on the land without touching it. In the Amazon they used “slash and smolder” to clear land around planted trees and build up jungle soil. In much of North America, Indians managed the land with fire. They also pushed back the hordes of bison, deer and passenger pigeons to protect their cornfields. The wilderness seen by John Muir and other 19th-century romantics was actually wilder and more forested than the America of 1491, Mann says.

“Mann does not present his thesis as an argument for unrestrained development. It is an argument, though, for human management of natural lands and against what he calls the “ecological nihilism” of insisting that forests be wholly untouched.

“He concludes:

Native Americans ran the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its state in 1491, they will have to create the world’s largest gardens.”

Bruce Ramsey is an editorial writer for The Seattle Times

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2002435158_mann14.html

I hope this is a better indication of where I was attempting to lead you. (You’re correct; my first answer was off-the-mark)

The comparisons could be that some things are the same and some things are different. But perhaps for differing reasons.

Please read the above excerpt and make the obvious correlations between primative and modern society. Some are in conflict with what our prejudices have lead us to believe.

Good Luck.

8^{I)