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1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what
that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed)
question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before
the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans
were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before
Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by
primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced
technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the
archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose
discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491,
different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the
first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge
around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even
20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more
populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally
assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with
nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents,
to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon
rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.
内容简介
Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is
necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation
and precise scientific measurements that often end up being
radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his
eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the
stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who
were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of
equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and
found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann
argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging
state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden
calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in
human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced
inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which
swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought
it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a
shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries
before. --Tom Nissley
作者简介
Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for Science and
The Atlantic Monthly, and has cowritten four previous books
including Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species
and The Second Creation. A three-time National Magazine
Award finalist, he has won awards from the American Bar
Association, the Margaret Sanger Foundation, the American Institute
of Physics, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others. His
writing was selected for The Best American Science Writing
2003 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing
2003. He lives with his wife and their children in Amherst,
Massachusetts.