dj zak brown

I just finished a very interesting book. 1491 by Charles C. Mann.

I've always felt like the common historial portrayal of pre-columbian America lacked a certain credibility. The story of the slow occupation of America by Eropeans has also seemed more like an moralistic tale expousing the rightness of progress and the unstoppable superior technology of our ancestors.


As Mann describes, the Indians (he uses this term, rather than Native American or American Indian, for reasons that he describes in the book) were every bit as technologically advanced as the Europeans with whom they made first contact. It should be noted that the Indians had different types of advanced technology. For example they were highly adept at using compression and tension in construction. When Pizarro and his men first travelled through the Inka empire they were amazed by the suspension bridges made of natural fibers that spanned many a canyon. At first the Spaniards refused to cross them, unable to believe that you could walt on something with nothing under it! This also points out how advanced the Indians were at using natural fibers. Again a good example is the Inka armor, it was made of plant fibers and was so much lighter than the Spanish soldiers' steel breastplates that they soon cast them aside in favor of the Inka's armor. This also brings up the oft-sited gunpowder weapons that the Spanish carried. In many cases, even up to the time of the Pilgrims in the 17th century, Europeans knew that their weapons were no match for a skilled bowman and they did their best to keep the unreliability of their weapons a secret. The Europeans didn't need advanced weapons though, they carried disease.


From the time of first contact, until the arrival of the first Conquisadors Mann estimates that some 90% of the occupants of the Americas died from a multi-waved pestilence. The first was hepatitus, then smallpox, influenza, measels and every other infection that was common in the European populations, but for a variety of reasons unknown to the Indans. One main reason for this was the lack of large domesticated animals in the Americas, no cows, no horses. Many of the diseases that were common in Europs were continually being re-introduced by cross species contamination, much as the modern conserns about the bird flu. The Indians had no cows and thus no immunity to smallpox. It's likely that as the point of first contact there were vastly more people living in North America than there were in Europe. However when the first settlers arrived from Europe they found a ghost continent, a place where many great civilizations had JUST fallen, sometimes as little as a few years prior. They found a world that had already been settled but where the people were missing...


In any case, check out the book, it's an excellent and informative read.