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A more appropriate subtitle for this iconoclastic book might be: "Everything you thought you knew about Pre-Columbian America is (probably) wrong."
Charles Mann is not himself an archeologist, anthropologist or geographer; he is a science writer with impressive credentials. He obviously is also an industrious fellow who has traveled widely, interviewed everyone he could find who seemed to matter, and burrowed conscientiously through a mountain of technical literature.
His intent in this book is to demolish the idea that America before Columbus was a howling wilderness thinly populated by inconsequential native people who can safely be ignored by historians. The general consensus among scholars today is that America had hosted a good number of highly advanced civilizations long before Columbus appeared and that its population when he did show up was equal to or greater than that of the Europe from whence he had sailed. One estimate put it in the "tens of millions."
The scope of this book's vision is wide, ranging from the coast of Massachusetts to the heights of the Andes and the Amazon rain forest. This gives it a rich underpinning of history, legend and scholarship; it also gives it a loose and blurry focus as Mann's argument moves abruptly from upland Peru to Massachusetts and from the Mississippi flood plain opposite Saint Louis to ancient Mexico.
The reader learns quite quickly that very little about this vast subject can be pinned down with certainty. Every theory that has been advanced seems to have generated a counter-theory --- and Mann shows that scientific types are as capable as ward-heeler politicians of nasty public invective and personal attacks on each other. He seems almost to take delight in detailing their catfights and hair-pulling matches.
Another lesson the lay reader takes from this book is the vast sweep of geological time. Mann writes of the rise and fall of empires over a span of perhaps 20 millennia. If two experts come within a century or so of dating a certain event or shard of pottery, the assumption is that they agree with each other. Population movements and geological events that took place over 200 or 300 years are called "abrupt." It makes the modern reader suddenly aware of how small we bulk on the cosmic scale of time.
Even with these cautions, Mann's book is full of fascinating tales of places like the great Inca city of Tenochtitlan --- in its heyday, it was larger than Paris --- and Tawantinsuyu on the shore of Lake Titicaca in the high Andes, a marvel of architecture and economic prosperity. Closer to home he writes enthrallingly about the Plymouth Colony and about the great settlement at what is now Cahokia, Illinois, just across the Mississippi from modern-day Saint Louis. Cahokia, once the largest settlement north of the Rio Grande and a center of trade and government, is today a tiny place of interest only to archeologists.
Mann ranges across agriculture, government, warfare, economics and population movement in his broad-gauge survey of two continents and the historically rich Central American isthmus that connects them. Variations in religious beliefs and practices loom especially large.
His prose is lively enough, but it can get highly technical, and he does have a tendency to get bogged down in the minutiae of some of his subjects. His discussions of agriculture, for example, will daunt readers who are not comfortable with terms like "mitochondrial haplogroups." Elsewhere one must deal with terms like glyptodonts, caliche and zoonotic.
At the very end of his book Mann confronts the clash between environmentalists and developers, a theme that has lurked in the background of much of his text. He sees this endless controversy as a clash between two conflicting philosophical principles: nomos (rationality, artifice) and physis (irrationality, nature). He comes down tentatively and without much conviction somewhere in the middle. We have to accept the need to bring order to nature, but at the same time we must respect the rights and historical accomplishments of native peoples, who were anything but the ignorant savages we heard about in school. Our learned tour guide seems unwilling to choose sides.
This is disappointing --- but we cannot deny that we have learned a lot from him in the course of this long and difficult journey through time.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn
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