1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
By: Charles Mann 2006
541 pages
Mann draws on recent scholarship to offer a radical picture of American history before the arrival of Columbus. This book tours major American civilizations arguing for their sophistication and scale. Mann builds a case for extensive settlement across the continents starting over 30,000 years ago. These civilizations engineered their environment to support complex agriculture enabling social systems with large concentrations of people. They developed sophisticated political systems which governed empires spanning thousands of miles. Much of this was never apparent to early colonizers due to massive death from the pathogens they introduced. While Mann presents many contentious issues as settled he makes a convincing case that American civilization was far more developed than your history textbook would have you believe.