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Imma shill this book in a parent comment as well because it deserves it. It questions and addresses a lot of misconceptions about the Americas before European contact - especially in regards to population size and levels of "advancement" of civilizations in the hemisphere. Also because I'm passionate about all things history related and in general, a nerd.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann.
Probably my favorite book I read in college because it's genuinely interesting and written for a broad audience.
I highly recommend 1491 by Charles C Mann. Ironically from Amazon.com for more info about pre-Columbian societies. He has a whole section on the Amazon and how the plants are purposefully selected, not completely wild as many assumed.
For anyone looking for literature on this particular subject (colonization's effects on the native population and what the Americas were like pre European contact), I highly recommend1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann.
It's a great read, accessible, and very informative.
If there is anyone who hasn't acquired any new information on Native Americans since high school (in particular, but it's universally useful and fascinating information) I super suggest you read about the people who use to dominate these continents - it's fucking awesome. 1491 by Charles Mann is a really broad and informative read that works great as an American Anthropology Sparknotes.
Those are some very racist and ignorant assumptions. I hope that you're just trolling, but if not, please read up on pre-Columbian society in the Americas and how much inhumanity the colonizers brought. It's nothing anyone should associate with a just god.
I'll just note that 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus uses "Indians" for the express reason that this was, in the author's experience, the most common and widespread self-reference.
These are more than likely irrigation works. The native people of the Americas were incredible agriculturalists, they even bioengineered the Amazon rainforest (I.e they created it). Unfortunately around 90% of them were killed in the 100 years post contact through plague/illness.
This is an incredible book if you’re interested in the subject.
https://www.amazon.ca/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus/dp/1400032059
Great read on pre-colonial societies. Take a dive into the North American civilizations specifically, and you'll get practical examples of socialist economies operating within democratic institutions. There was a widespread tradition of communal economic systems and proto-democratic structures that were functionally operable for centuries prior to the introduction of Eurasian style authoritarianism.
Not a blog but I liked 1491 about pre-columbian societies. My main takeaway was just how hard it is to know anything for certain about those societies, with so many records not just lost but actively destroyed.
For me, it's pre-U.S. history. Native Americans have a fascinating history that is unfortunately unknown or misunderstood by most Americans. The book 1491 was a good introduction to the topic a few years ago for me. Since then, I've made it a point to stop at Native American museums and cultural centers whenever I travel across the U.S. Moundville in Alabama and the Cherokee Heritage Center in Oklahoma are two of my favorites.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
Although not perfect, and not exclusively about Caral, this is one of my favorite books to recommend.
Every person is born with an "immunity profile" -- a combination of antibodies inherited from their parents that reduce the chances of dying from certain diseases. If you were born in the 1490s in Europe, you had one of about 50 different immunity profiles. If you were born in the same time period in the Americas, you had one of 4.
*Source: 1491 by Charles C. Mann
> I'm amazed how many people I know over the age of 60 genuinely don't accept that Columbus slaughtered natives.
It gets even worse!
Columbus was a shithead, but even if he had been a saint, he brought death with him - one of his sailors was carrying smallpox. The entirety of the population of the Americas had never been exposed before, there was zero immunity, and the consequences were... apocalyptic.
Columbus nearly depopulated both continents.
https://www.amazon.ca/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus/dp/1400032059
- My absolute favorite book to recommend is Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It's popular science, remarkably comprehensive for a massive topic, and brilliantly written. There are a few places where it exaggerates some achievements, or takes the positive side of an unclear debate in order to glorify Amerindian history - but many fewer than I would expect from a non purely academic book of that length. It also does an excellent job of citing sources, so you can go deeper into academic work from there if you hit upon a particularly interesting topic
- It definitely helped that my mom is a science teacher and my dad is a cultural anthropology professor. I always loved visiting old places and ruins, and liked being outside. And I was always most interested in the Pre-Columbian Americas - figuring out exactly where/when I want to study has been a struggle and is something I'm still doing, but I've leaned towards the central Andes because I've traveled there a bit and really fallen in love with so many things about that region and its past. I'm sure the same would have happened if I had simply gone to Mexico more than I did to Peru...but I didn't.
> land was primarily unsettled and unused
I would have disputed that, but recently read part of "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus"
> "the books paints a picture of a hemisphere utterly devastated by plague following contact, and a cultural death spiral so rapid that both natives and colonizers largely forgot what the continents looked like before."
You really can't blame 15th century people - no knowledge of germ theory.
If you are interested to know more about pre-Columbian America I highly recommend reading the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann. It's extremely objective (maybe a bit pro-Amerindian even, but it's barely noticeable).
If you are interested (I'm not trying to sell you anything, I rarely recommend books): https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
If you're thinking pre European colonization, 1491 was very informative for me. It goes over the major civilizations that existed before Spain established colonies.
Some people might suggest A People's History of the United States but I think Howard Zinn was pretty against US hegemony and it came through in his works. That said, his book goes over lots of things you wouldn't find in a US history book.
Oh, yes, I've been reading <em>1491</em> (Charles C. Mann) and that was mentioned. The "Dark Emu" book has started me on a journey around the world, looking at cultures before and after European invasions.
Yes, this was shared by a friend whose take was that the large uncontrollable fires we see today are directly connected to racial injustice against indigenous people. So it’s very anthrocentric. I thought it was an excellent take and a great example of intersectionality between racial justice and the environmental movement. I think the first episode purposely doesn’t span geologic timescales/glacial periods so they can highlight the racial history of fire suppression first.
Also 12,000 BCE probably isn’t accurate. There were waves of immigration down from present-day Canada each time the glaciers retreated, and the first wave was at least 30,000 BCE. This is based on newer genetic data. There’s an amazing book called 1491 that goes over this. It’s a great history of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
I'd strongly encourage you to consider reading 1491: New Revelations of America Before Columbus by Charles Mann if you haven't already.
North America, particularly portions of the southwest and midwest, saw several largely populated centers, though they each collapsed for various reasons.
You're absolutely correct that the mountainous terrain of the Andes and the dense jungles of modern day Brazil would seem to prohibit civilization, but the evidence we have that peoples not only did so but thrived for many years is evidence of their ingenuity and determination. The fact that the Inca had an empire with their capital's elevation at over 11,000 ft, for instance, is astounding.
If you haven't read it, I would suggest you read 1491, by Charles C. Mann. It goes over the variety of Amerindian agricultural and arboricultural practices in quite interesting detail. Long story short, there really were cultures that were quite capable of major feats of agriculture - e.g., the maize-based civilizations in Mexico and points south - but the dominant mode of environmental manipulation along the North American eastern seaboard and even in the Amazon was a (to modern eyes) weird system almost like gardening, with entire forest ecosystems molded to foster the proliferation of edible plants and huntable wildlife. Obviously insufficient to feed 8 billion humans, but interesting never the less.
1491 is a great book about the latest research and theories on the pre-Columbian Americas.
The conspiracy angle here being a greater understanding of the intense resistance to correcting the record on the Americas; just how advanced they were, and just how many of them died due to colonization (something like 90 million +).
This lesson can be applied to other spheres of human knowledge, and how we often need to provide an overabundance of evidence before the official position changes.
You can pull a lot of info from 1491 especially the sections about South America, where the cultures were isolated for millenia before contact with Europeans. I keep going back to this book, would definitely recommend.
I forgot to mention the most depressing book of all time 1491. It does not talk about 29 Palms specifically. But it does talk about what life was like in America before European contact.
The tribes in 29 Palms and Palm Springs were mostly left to themselves until after the Civil War, when the railroad moved in, then the desert gold rush happened, and after WWI GI's who had been blasted with mustard gas moved in to help heal their lungs.
1491: New revelations of the New World before Columbus by Charles Mann. The best popular overview of the pre-Columbian Americas I've read.
If anything, the dwarves run their economy and systems extremely close to how the Inca Empire operated their own; a lack of market economy, but trading with foreign powers, along with using a collectivist / redistribution method of distributing basic needs. Dwarves farm public fields and work public projects in exchange for their basic needs covered, occasionally allotted private property that is nevertheless still state-created. The nobility is both part of this system and above it, having their needs covered but also dictating how this redistribution should occur.
The only thing needed to make it complete would be for Dwarven caravans to work the same way, with you giving over a tithe of your products and having your deficits covered by other specialized settlements - if you grow plump helmets you have iron supplied by a mining fortress which needs your plump helmets, for example. Less fun would be the tithe of talent where your best skilled workers would be taken to the capital in exchange for better urban products being distributed to you - wait, shit, is that what migrants are? Is that how hill dwarves will work? Hmm.
It even suffers from the same problem of the Inca; instead of being at constant risk of famine and staying ahead of scarcity, both the Inca and dwarves have trouble with easily winding up with more production than they can actually store, necessitating vast storehouses simply to hold the overflow lest your food rot in the fields and your workshops become cluttered. When did you actually last die of starvation? Even a damn 3x3 plump helmet farm can feed dozens of dwarves, maize ain't got shit on those fat purple 'shrooms. Tombs and warehouses make up a huge portion of both Inca cities and Dwarf Fortresses.
As for the 'bad end', I will point to the fact that most dwarf fortresses end not with the destruction of the fortress but with death by FPS. It is not really that hard to make your fortress all but invulnerable and self-sufficient, if you try. Even when you do die violently it is usually as a result of invasion (and the aftereffects thereof), which is hardly your economy's fault.
As a final point of evidence: they both are mountain cultures who like capes and random wool/plant fiber clothing and geometric designs and really don't want to live in the nearby giant forests, though for somewhat different reasons.
Source: a lot of places, but I wholeheartedly recommend 1491 by Charles C. Mann, an amazing book about Pre-Colombian America.
Not a new thing in my reality. I remember reading about the origins of corn in Charles Mann's "1491" book, where it is described to be very colorful
You should read 1491 and America Before. Also there a numerous journal entries that have been published about the true history of Columbus and westward expansion.
Edit: words and formatting
I'm not sure of the commenters sources, but I have read the same thing in two books.
1491 - https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
Guns, Germs and Steel - https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552
I'm no history buff, but I thoroughly enjoyed these two books.
Do I have the book for you.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a good, approachable overview.
To reply to your now-deleted comment:
> I'm speaking FACS! you should be a shame thinking you understand history if you think what I'm saying isn't true. where did you get your information, Pocahontas?
oh just
Mann, Charles C. <em>1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus.</em> Alfred a Knopf Incorporated, 2005.
Jablonski, Nina G., ed. The First Americans: the Pleistocene Colonization of the New World. Calif. Acad. of Sciences, 2002.
Cordell, Linda S., and Maxine McBrinn. Archaeology of the Southwest. Routledge, 2016.
Ames, Kenneth M., and Herbert DG Maschner. Peoples of the Northwest Coast: their archaeology and prehistory. Thames and Hudson, 2000.
Pauketat, Timothy R., and Alt, Susan M.Medieval Mississippians: The Cahokian world. School for Advanced Research Press, 2015.
Kelton, Paul. Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715. U of Nebraska Press, 2007.
Cameron, Catherine M., Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund, eds. Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America. University of Arizona Press, 2015.
Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: the uncovered story of Indian enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
Hudson, Charles M., and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds. The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704. University of Georgia Press, 1994.
Hudson, Charles. Knights of Spain, warriors of the sun: Hernando de Soto and the south's ancient chiefdoms. University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Gallivan, Martin D. The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake. University Press of Florida, 2016.
Gleach, Frederic W. Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. U of Nebraska Press, 2000.
Calloway, Colin G. One vast winter count: the Native American west before Lewis and Clark. U of Nebraska Press, 2020.
Schmalz, Peter S. The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario. University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Hassig, Ross. War and society in ancient Mesoamerica. Univ of California Press, 1992.
Berdan, Frances, Richard E. Blanton, Elizabeth Hill Boone, Mary G. Hodge, and Michael E. Smith. Aztec Imperial Strategies. Vol. 15. Dumbarton Oaks, 1996.
Schele, Linda. A forest of kings: The untold story of the ancient Maya. William Morrow & Company, 1990.
Smith, Michael E., and Berdan, Frances. (2003). The Postclassic Mesoamerican World. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Restall, Matthew. Seven myths of the Spanish conquest. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Coe, Michael D., Javier Urcid, and Rex Koontz. Mexico: from the Olmecs to the Aztecs. Thames & Hudson, 2019.
Covey, R. Alan. How the Incas built their heartland: state formation and the innovation of imperial strategies in the Sacred Valley, Peru. University of Michigan Press, 2006.
and a small amount more I may indeed have left out, as well as articles that can be accessed at places like JSTOR and researchgate along with correspondences from other scholars and researchers. So, nothing much I guess.
But you're right, my dude, I should totally instead be getting my history from...IDK, Rush Limbaugh? No idea what kind of amazing guru taught you your complete and unabridged knowledge.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is well regarded and very readable.
He also wrote a long-form essay on it for The Atlantic if you want a bit of the flavor before purchasing: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/
From what I understand, there is a reasonable amount of evidence that there was a relatively large civilization living in the Amazon. 1491 talks about it.
The way of life that they must have lived was relatively different from what is described by /u/firedrops. For one thing, cutting down a tree with a stone axe is terribly difficult, and clearing an area large enough to farm takes far too long to be useful - you'd basically be spending all your time chopping down trees.
Instead, precolumbian Indians discovered how to make very productive soil and planted large orchards.
Cambridge History of Ancient China
Lol just kidding, that brick hasn't arrived yet. I am so fucking excited for it, though.
My actual favorite is probably The Dawn of Innovation, by Charles Morris.
It's a mildly eclectic book on early industrial revolution inventions and mechanics that doesn't shy away from going into the technical details of various machines. However, the way it wanders between topics is mildly undirected and, as a result, it touches on a range of fascinating topics. It starts with the shipbuilding contest that the War of 1812 on the Great Lakes became, wanders through a discussion of Babbage and other instances of high precision machining in 19th century Britain, talks about steam engines and the creation of truly interchangeable parts, and other stuff besides.
It's such an awesome book. I can't even remember how many times I've read it. If you have an interest in the history of technology at all it's 100% worth it.
If you're an avid reader of history you're more likely to have already read this one, but <em>1491</em> is also a great book. It's written by a journalist, not a historian, its a bit outdated nowadays (because the archeology of the topic it covers is swiftly evolving), and iylt wasn't exactly 100% accurate at release, but it's good enough and it is very well written.
In the off chance you haven't heard of it/read it, Charles Mann explores the Americas before the arrival of Columbus, examining stuff like the current debate on what the pre-Columbian American population might have been, civilizations and tribes in various areas from the Algonquin Dawnlands in modern New England down through the long history of civilization in the Andes mountains and everything in between. It's detailed without being dry, it manages to cover topics that haven't really seeped into the popular consciousness on historical understanding of the pre-Columbian Americas in an exciting, engaging way, and it fills in a lot of details in places with a little more presence in popular knowledge.
If you have the taste for it and want something a bit more scholarly, I have recently fallen in love with The Economic History of China. It covers Chinese economic history from the Zhou Dynasty through the fall of the Qing. It is a dense book absolutely full of foot notes and citations with a hold mine of a bibliography in the back. It tends towards the dry at some points but is nevertheless a masterfully assembled work of scholarship. If this kind of thing is to your taste, this is an amazing book and I cannot recommend it enough.
Be warned, though, it assumes some mild familiarity with pre-Imperial and Imperial Chinese history already. You'll get by of you know nothing about Chinese history, but it helps to already know the basic outline of the dynastic succession and that kind of thing.
There are a couple of interesting books regarding the latest discoveries in the American continents:
1491 toches the population topic for example https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
This might be a bit advanced for high school (depending on students of course), but its worth a read regardless. 1491 by Charles Mann. Here's an Atlantic article about it. Here's the Amazon link to his book.
Maybe not the exact information you want, but this is as close as I can come to actual data behind what the above statement is referring to!
This article in the Guardian presents the evidence that the Amazon is actually a massive human garden of sorts.
Agriculture focused on planting one crop per field like we see in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia was not really developed in the Americas. They instead planted an interwoven network of plants that all interacted with each other to repel pests and enrich the soil. Sourced to this book by Charles C Mann about pre-Columbian Native life. Ironically its sold on Amazon....
So no one really realized the Amazon is actually a massive food producing human-influenced garden, instead of a completely random mass of natural jungle. Source Using satellites and Lidar, archaeologists are able to peer into the jungle itself and have noticed a complex web of roads and networks that lay beneath the dense canopies. I wish there were more funding for research like this!
Some more additional information about the possible millions that lived in the Amazon before the 1500's is in this National Geographic article.
I've tried to include a ranger of sources, from popular science magazines to actual articles so anyone can read at whatever level they would like to into this! So fascinating!
Hoo boy, Chinese and Indigenous American history are enough to fill an entire library by themselves.
For a good starting point to branch out from with Indigenous America, this is still the reigning champion:
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
And this is the best one-volume history of China and one that applies a deconstructionist/historiographical approach.
Here's the first one. Don't buy it from Amazon, though lol
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
Sounds like a good book, I'll give it a shot. However, just by the synopsis it seems to agree with my point that indigenous people were largely wiped out by disease and warfare from European settlers before the US was a country.
"For four hundred years--from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s--the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations."
You seem to think I am arguing that the US did not contribute to this, I am not. I am arguing that most of the damage was done by the time the US became a country. Unfortunately, the US continued the same persecution and genocide that its European forbearers had started. Also, what the US did on the North American continent, the British continued doing on the same continent in Canada and elsewhere like Africa and India, and the Middle East and Australia and New Zealand and the Falkland Islands and the Carribbean etc. etc.
Since we're recommending books on this subject, I recommend reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before the conquest. https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
One of its main points is that the pop. of pre-Colombus America was much larger in population than had been traditionally been understood. By the time Europeans reached many of these places, the populations had dwindled due to disease that spread without any direct contact with Europeans.
One last thing, if an article is correctly sourced there is nothing inherently better or worse than quoting is than a book. I should've found an academic article but decided to go with something short and to the point. Books can be just as full of shit as an article and vise versa.
It's been some years since I h studied anything, so I'm going by memory... but off the top of my head there's the big two cities you hear about: "Cahokia" of the Mississippians in what's now Illinois which had a population of like 20-40,000, depending on where you draw the boundary; then there's Chaco Canyon built by the Pueblo in the southwest, which was probably 10-15,000. Nothing like the scale of Tenochtitlan of the Mexica, which at ~200K+ was bigger than Paris at the time, but still noteworthy. The problem is much of eastern/central north America was an incredibly abundant place with lots of trees and little stone, which resulted in more ephemeral construction methods and fewer large, permanent "city centers". Even in south America the same thing is evident: all the big construction projects are clustered in very rugged, unforgiving terrain. There's little "macro" evidence of similar population centers in the Amazon basin, for example, but close examination has revealed evidence of extensive agriculture in the form of unusual concentrations of "wild" food crop trees, and numerous areas of artificial terra preta fertilization.
The practical upshot of it all is that it's fairly certain that nearly all the "nice" areas of eastern North America were heavily populated with fixed medium density settlements that simply didn't leave much in the way of lasting evidence. There's no reason to believe that the rich forests along the east coast didn't give rise to large, fixed maize farming populations when a place as inhospitable as the Mexican Plateau had a population of ~25 million. The problem is that there's little in the way of documentation beyond anecdotal accounts, because by the time the Spanish had finished plundering the big centralized civilizations, disease had already taken hold and was methodically wiping out the remaining uncontacted groups.
Probably the best general overview on the subject is <em>1491</em> by Charles Mann.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491
Probably at your local public library.
>Do you have any good sources on what we definitely do know about them?
Khipu are unfortunately one of the topics where we know very little, and discussions about what we do know rarely make it out of academic circles. One book that does talk about them is my favorite nonfiction book to recommend: Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which is full of fascinating and well-written information on the Pre-Columbian Americas.
> How do you see a question like this being answered?
In most ways, it will never be fully answered. In addition to all the information and evidence that has been lost over time, we have to remember that the Amazon had many communities who existed over thousands of years, and both different times and different places almost certainly produced various forms of government/life. So I'm not expecting that we will completely solve this question. But we can learn more, and that often comes from things like identifying elite residences and artifacts in excavated communities, tracking the distribution of exotic materials, looking at art forms (which unfortunately degrade quickly in the Amazon, unless they're ceramic), and other things like that.
So I should have been clearer - when I ask about the extent and nature of politically complex states in the Amazon, I'm really just hoping that archaeologists will eventually put time and resources into that area, and figure out as much as possible. That of course won't be everything, but I'd like to reach the point where we feel like we've learned large chunks of what can be learned from the things that are left.
>Archaeology always seems like a never ending jigsaw puzzle to me, except every time you place a correct piece the whole puzzle scales down and a 1000 new pieces are added.
This is absolutely the case. Humans and our lives are too complicated to figure out in the present; figuring them out in the past is impossibly more difficult.
try this book, 1491, while it does not specifically focus just on the south west, its one of the few unbiased works on the subject piecing together as much history as is known. https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
It's difficult, I think this is partially why the narrative is taking so long to change. The information is scattered in hard-to-access scientific articles, indigenous wisdoms, European records, native historical writings, etc. I think the book 1491 is a good start, but it covers the whole of the Americas, and so can never really goes in-depth on anything, and has to leave out a lot. So I honestly don't have any good book recommendations on the overall topic, especially ones written in recent years with our knew influx of knowledge on the subject. This was a good book, but deals with more modern indigenous people in urban environments, and felt a little text-booky. I guess I'd recommend just following the links I posted above, and then following information that you find interesting.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by charles c mann. I highly recommend it. Very interesting read.
I've read it and am currently listening to it with my partner.
1491 is all about the America’s before the arrival of Europeans. Chock full of information and well written to boot!
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
Check out the book "1491" - https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
It's easy to forget that until the recent discovery of the Americas by the taught colonial history of today, we had no records or knowledge of the whole of human history carrying out simultaneously on the other side of the world.
Book is surprisingly engagingly written considering what most would call a stuffy subject. It basically proports that the Americas were tremendously evolved/advanced, and that western history as we know it has no understanding of how much human history lived and died on the other half of the globe.
It covers trade, culture, science, history of the Americas before Colombus.
The part about MASSIVE portions of the amazon rainforest being completely engineered blows my mind.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
It's a pretty good journalistic/pop-history overview of American civilization immediately preceding Columbus' voyages.
Always worth plugging that the book 1491 by Charles Mann is a really good anthropological study of the pre-columbia Americas.
That number is admittedly near the high end of estimates, but whether the true number is 50, 75 or 100 million, it's much higher than traditionally taught in schools, as well as this video. The real story though is the vast difference in cultural practices from what we are lead to believe.
The book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is probably the best single resource I've found, It's just a really good read too:
Here are some other quick stops though:
"the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe":
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/
"Research by some scholars provides population estimates of the pre-contact Americas to be as high as 112 million in 1492":
For maps, it’s a little tricky.
Most of the folks living in the Americas were tribal people; they didn’t exactly have countries or defined borders. Closest you’re probably going to get is a distribution of language families.
North America
South America
Within these Language Families there were sometimes multiple tribes & bands
Here’s a link to a listing of many of the tribes, broken up by area. Don’t know how complete it is for all areas, but the listings cover a lot of the tribes.
http://www.native-languages.org/culture-areas.htm
There are quick summaries for each of the tribes & links to more info.
As far as info on large civilizations, technology & Cultures, A good general overview is 1491 by Charles C. Mann. He does a pretty good job of coving several areas, & how the locals organized their societies & impacted the land they lived on. It’s a really broad overview, covering all of the Americas. To get more details, you’re going to have to focus in on a specific region or people.
Gonna hijack this comment to recommend a book on this very subject: 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
It happened before he arrived. The N. American indigenous population was around 100 million before the epidemic that killed them all. There were major highway systems that stretched from Canada to S. America, and they lived relatively modern lives. Not exactly Roman Empire lives, but still not exactly what is portrayed. The idea of Native American civilization being small, independent, always warring tribes comes from what Europeans saw after whatever it was killed them off (I can't quite remember what exactly it was that killed them). A city of a few hundred natives being decimated to just 10-20 people, fighting for leftover resources from a neighboring town that was left in similar ruins...
This all happened very shortly before Europeans made their mark. Columbus does get a bad rap, but people forget he was either lost or stuck on a sandbar for much of his time in the New World. While he sat on the sandbar, wondering if he would ever make it home, many other people came to the Continental N. America to do their own damage. Columbus gets all of the flack because he was first.
But the Natives were all but gone by then anyway. Check out the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Also, check out this thumbnail history of Columbus's travels to the Americas: Columbus in the Americas. That book is written by a Native American. You'd expect it to be incredibly critical of Columbus, but he paints him differently: as a sad failure who couldn't really do anything right. You almost feel sorry for the guy. You know that cousin who is always fucking up majorly and can't get his shit together to save his life? That's Columbus.
I also recommend 1491: New Revelations of the Time Before Columbus, for a focus on the Americas. https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
>You're forgetting that Europeans deliberately started and encouraged smallpox epidemics among native populations.
so, not americans then? k.
either way, no, small pox and other diseases spread on their own. before pizarro even entered the incan empire 50% of population was already killed due to the spread of small pox
good book if you haven't read it:
read the descriptiom at least. it will reinforce what i am saying.
>At the siege of Fort Pitt in 1763, British troops gave the natives infected blankets in an effort to "extirpate this execrable race". The route of the trail of tears took a deliberate detour through an area infested with Cholera. In the 1837 great plains smallpox epidemic, the US Secretary of war ordered that certain native tribes were not to be provided with vaccines.
source?
its interesting you state all this btw because, on the one hand you have completely changed your argument from bison to this...
lastly, there is actually contention as to whether small pox blankets were used (though i happen to err on the side that they were used)
>Even when disease breakouts weren't the fault of Europeans, they certainly didn't have any qualms with brutally suppressing any survivors
so a conqueror behaves like a conqueror. k. even then, definitely not all the time.it just depended. not genocide regardless. again, you are trying to shift the argument. i wont let you do that.
>>manifest destiny wasn't genocide
>If deliberately infecting a population with diseases, stealing their land killing off their food sources, destroying their culture, and leaving them to starve isn't genocide, then what is?
intentionally attempting to wipe out a people. if the US wanted to do that. they would have, there would be no indian reservations.
everything you said is indicative of many many conquering peoples. also, give me a source on intentional removal of food source of the indians. i am more under the impression that they were killed for sport and commerce
>I'll leave you with a quote by Colonel John Chivington of the US army
>>I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians
proves absolutely nothing. thats like arguing white people are racist because you can find one. there are plenty of commanders that did care about the indians and did not engage in wanton slaughter
This whole site is good, in fact it got me well started. This is the page about my own system. I plan to rebuild this fall, 3x bigger. Historical background about corn's history from <em>1491</em> by Mann.
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
This book, I can't think of where without it in front of me atm :(
There are some really interesting things about the Amazon in it, I highly recommend it.
Great book about this, called 1491, i encourage anyone who's interested to read it. Not written by a historian, so it reads incredibly well.
Oh I can understand that, I have to read books in my secondary languages to understand them too :)
If you like general non-fiction stuff, try out:
1491: New Revelations Of the Americas Before Columbus
+
+
This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress
Read 1491. It goes into the decimation of natives by disease. Americans didn't have to commit genocide against natives because successive waves of disease did it for them. In the journals of Lewis and Clark they recount native stories of successive waves of disease between 1760 and 1790 that killed 90% of Pacific Northwest natives.
Over the last few years books like 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus seem to have made a pretty decent case for something not far from that.
1491 is my favorite history book, pre-colonial america.
> out of a country that had been inhabited by stone age peoples
i highly suggest you read 1491. i'm about a quarter of the way through right now, and on almost every page, i'm reading history that calls into question or outright refutes much of what we were taught and always believed about the indigenous populations of north, south, and central america.
tl;dr: not stone age peoples, don't believe the hype, read 1491 (don't just believe the hype there either, but ask yourself what makes sense...)
1491 covers the Americas prior to Columbus.
Good stuff, if highly speculative. I suggest anyone interested in this sort of thing also read 1491 about life in the Americas before Columbus. Very insightful.
You should consider giving this book a read, because I don't think the above comment reflects the current academic understanding of the historical Americas.
>So by your argument then, as of a year or so ago, if I wanted to marry a man, as a man, I was immoral. Though if I want to marry a man today, it's not immoral. Laws are provisional. I think most of us would want to agree that morality is not provisional. So attaching morality to the adherence of laws takes us down a path we do not want to go.
Once again, you're missing the point. Morality is required to build a functioning society. Our society is built upon the idea that laws govern all men. Abiding by the legal process, where it exists, is a moral obligation. I'm going to link this again, because it explains how your stunted idea of morality is the result of a bias. http://politicsofthemind.com/2012/12/01/the-six-moral-foundations-the-real-issues-lying-beneath-the-surface-of-political-debate/
>And that's directly connected to immigration?
It's a contributing factor, but by no means the only or even the greatest. But you can't deny over 10 million illegal immigrants has had a large effect on the economy, particularly in border states such as California.
>I'd argue that the only long-term solution is economic sustainability, but that's for another time. I'm just making the point that the idea that immigrants come and "take err jobs" is a lot more nuanced than some suggest. They don't just come and take our jobs. There are several models that show they actually help to increase wages for the 'natives'. The economic stagnation you refer to above could be attributed to several factors.
No one who has spent more than 10 seconds thinking about the issue seriously supports the Lump of Labor fallacy. What you are suggesting is essentially a Ponzi scheme—there isn't an infinite supply of third-world labor. Therefore, it is not a sustainable strategy, and discourages sustainable behavior by delaying efforts to increase birthrates or develop automation. All you're doing is shuffling people around. Developing countries are urbanizing, and population growth is slowing down across the board. Mass immigration is not a long-term solution to economic prosperity. I find it intriguing that you put the word 'native' in apostrophes, considering all the word means is 'people who were born within this country's borders.'
>98-99 percent? Do you have a source for that? I'm sure census data was being collected throughout the 18/19th centuries to nail down that 98-99 percent figure.
I was going off the top of my head, but most sources attribute a 90-97% decline due to smallpox alone, and further reductions due to resultant decline in living conditions. There was definitely a 99% decline in the settled, agricultural societies. I'd recommend this book for a detailed treatment of this subject: http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
>So what you're saying then is that today's immigrants are doing it the wrong way? Or maybe they're doing it the right way?
They're doing it the wrong way. We, as citizens, have a right to regulate our borders and determine who can enter our country. Was it wrong for the Sioux to take over the land over their neighbors? Yes. Does that mean that we Americans (or any other group of people, for that matter) are justified in settling Sioux territory just because they 'stole' it from some other group of people? No, of course not. Reaching back into history, to determine who did what to whom, is a pointless exercise.
He's both correct and horribly incorrect.
The chief harm happened entirely inadvertently -- and LONG before any colonists were in the picture -- in the immediate years following 1492 (Cf Charles Mann's excellent summary books: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created).
Probably THE biggest and most "genocidal" epidemic tragedy among the natives in North America -- wiping out the majority of the Amerindians (unknown countless millions) and virtually destroying their cultures -- resulted from the fact that Hernando de Soto's expedition not only brought & spread HUMAN diseases (the whole array of endemic European disease, including measles, smallpox, and chicken pox, etc; against which the natives had zero immunity and no experience with) but that they also had lots of non-native animals with them: horses, mules, dogs, herds of swine (pigs), etc -- many of which got loose and spread disease themselves. De Soto's expedition encountered large villages with rather sophisticated (relatively) cultures -- later expeditions -- just a few years/decades on -- in the same areas (mainly southeastern US) encountered only small scattered remnants.
So while he is correct that in some specific instances the colonists and military engaged in (or at least planned/attempted to engage in) the use of disease as a "biological weapon"...
He is emphatically incorrect in his belief that it was the major problem that depopulated the American continents.
In short his accusation of an intentional "genocide" relative to the majority of the depopulation is bullshit (which was long ago debunked -- by via various advocates/books keeps cropping up).
I always like going back to historical sources. There are two major episodes in western history of a post-apocalypse that I know well enough to draw from.
The first is the medieval period in Europe. Rome was a glorious and large empire built on the backs of many golden ages. Technology was at a high point, there was something resembling a scientific method, there were modern forms of government, enlightened merchant classes, international trade that went as far as China and India, and even the faraway barbaric tribes such as the Gauls and Celts were being civilized under Roman influence.
Then it all fell apart. The most glorious and advanced society the world had yet seen, and it turned decadent and over-reached and under-estimated its foes, and the Visigoths and Vandals fell upon the Empire, splitting it up and sending Europe into 1000+ years of stagnation.
The history of medieval Europe is the story of a people forgetting past glories. Lost were the technologies, lost was the architecture, lost was the history and culture and philosophy. Smoldering libraries tell no tales. Europeans were a people without a history—they had only mythology, an accepted church chronology that had precious little to say about the monuments, domed ruins, hundred-mile roads and aqueducts. Gone were the cities, and with them the citizens. Instead the village reigned supreme, and inside these scattered settlements lived oppressed, frightened people who didn't even think to ask what had come before.
The second post-apocalypse is not one which we lived through, but which we caused, so we often do not know that there was such a thing.
The Americas before Columbus' "discovery" of the "new world" were home to several old and thriving civilizations. In the south were the Inka and Mexica (often called the Aztec). In the north was the democratic federation of the Five Nations (often called the Iroquois). They had technology unlike any seen in Europe up to that time, empires far larger than any in Europe, and political systems that had never been seen in Europe (in the case of the Mexica) or that, when mixed with old Greek notions of Democracy, were the foundation of America's current constitution (in the case of the Five Nations).
Native Americans, meeting Europeans for the first time, often described them as squat, filthy, sickly humans who were entirely oblivious of the world around them. Yes, their ships were impressive, but their guns were less effective that Indian archers in terms of accuracy, firing speed, and penetrating power, and they traded their stupid baubles and trinkets for things that were just lying on the ground, waiting to be picked up. They were also completely obvious to the complicated societies that they'd stepped into—societies that consisted of man and nature in a balance that had never been seen in Europe.
Native Americans manipulated their landscapes in ways we're only now beginning to understand. The goddamn Amazon forest is likely a HUMAN ARTIFACT, combed and bred and molded over hundreds of generations to provide a perfectly easy lifestyle to the civilizations that lived within. The Northeaster forests were not in a state of nature, but instead were perfectly cultivated biomes designed to provide a steady stream of meat, fruits, and wood to the peoples therein.
And then we Europeans came. We landed, and sure we killed some Indians and whatnot, but mostly we just sat there, sickly, coughing on them.
And disease spread.
And spread.
And spread.
It came before us. The Mexica fell to Cortez not only because he was a masterful Machiavellian Prince, but also because they were currently undergoing a raging civil war caused by the death of much of the ruling class to smallpox. The pristine wilderness that the Pilgrims landed on was actually a former thriving feudal kingdom that had, just years before, seen over 50% of its people killed by disease. Cities melted away overnight, social order broke down, and those few survivors eventually found each other, coming together in patchwork nomadic groups that the Pilgrims and all before and after them mistook for the normal state of the Indian.
But it wasn't. It was a picture of a civilization post-apocalypse, a people who had lost 90% of their population, and land depopulated and thus ready for the taking.
(If you'd like to learn more, I'd highly suggest reading 1491, which is probably the one book that's been the most influential on my own fantasy writing. Pay close attention to the story of Squanto, which is probably the most badass fantasy story that was ever told, even though it's real.)
Read 1491 by Charles C Mann (http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059). It will completely change your perception of New World Civilization. I would also recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse both by Jared Diamond. Yes, all are long reads but that is because there is no short, simple answer to your question.
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