[HN Gopher] 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbu...
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1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005)
Author : walterbell
Score : 53 points
Date : 2022-12-28 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kirkusreviews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kirkusreviews.com)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| The Vikings arrived in North America in 1021AD.... long, long
| before Columbus.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58996186.amp
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/4-the-greenland-viking...
|
| Or:
|
| https://youtu.be/lmbY-GrM8pI
| doitLP wrote:
| The book is great but pretty old now. Can anyone comment on how
| it holds up to new discoveries/advances in knowledge we've made
| in the last 20 years?
| thinking4real wrote:
| "Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as
| anyone else. They built great and wealthy cities; they lived, for
| the most part, on farms"
|
| "He closes with a provocative thesis: namely, that the present
| worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to Locke or
| Newtonian physics, but to Indians, "living, breathing role models
| of human liberty.""
|
| Oh lord. Revisionists begetting revisionists.
|
| I had a buddy in college who insisted that Natives were 'almost
| as technologically advanced as europeans' and if not for a few
| miscalculations in battle, would have effectively flung them off
| and advanced to a society beyond our wildest dreams.
|
| Of course, he failed to respond when I mentioned that there were
| no modern weapons and the mystical technology he assumed to exist
| amounted to little more than what Europeans had had for tens of
| thousands of years.
|
| It's really sad how much hyperbole gets thrown into the
| revisionism of prehistoric civilizations. It's not doing the
| descendants of these people any favors to make up fictitious
| reinventions of their technological advancements.
| justinator wrote:
| _> "Native Americans were as active in shaping their
| environments as anyone else. They built great and wealthy
| cities; they lived, for the most part, on farms"_
|
| These farms didn't look like European farms, but it's hard to
| think of, for example: settlements in the Amazon being anything
| less than a living, breathing, fruit orchard. The eastern
| seaboard of the US had huge groves of nut trees, as well as
| cleared out hunting grounds. The farms were just sustainable,
| and worked within the environment instead of against it
| (example: planting in a desert, piping in massive amounts of
| water, and obliterating entire country-sized hydrology
| systems.)
|
| Perhaps what you are in, is "denial".
| coredog64 wrote:
| > example: planting in a desert, piping in massive amounts of
| water
|
| The pre-Columbian Pima had irrigation agriculture in what is
| now Phoenix (aka "a desert").
| justinator wrote:
| Compare the pre-Columbian Pima and the contemporary
| Americans and describe the differences in scale. You have
| taken my sentence out of context by removing, "and
| obliterating entire country-sized hydrology systems."
| Symmetry wrote:
| That might be revisionism from the perspective of the history
| you get from Disney movies but I don't think Mann is at all out
| of mainstream history here and I think you're doing him a
| disservice by comparing him to your friend. I'd hope anybody
| doing an american history course in US high schools these days
| would know that, say, the Iroquois practiced farming though the
| bits in 1491 about the way they burned out underbrush to
| encourage large animals deeper into the forest or tried to
| encourage Chestnut trees over others was new to me.
|
| And people like Ben Franklin certainly wrote about Indians as
| models of liberty, in his case in contrast to the Germans he
| though were subservient by nature. And Rousseau certainly had a
| lot to say about them. What ended up being the US political
| system had many influences. I think the Corsican 1755
| constitution is an underrated influence but also the lack of
| hereditary nobility among the natives. I think it's easy to
| underestimate how natural a nobility seems when all the
| societies you know have it, until you meet one that doesn't.
| krapp wrote:
| You may be right about technology, but the political system in
| the US and its Constitution was based on, among other things,
| that of the Iroquois Confederacy. The premise that Native
| Americans influenced the global spread of democracy by way of
| US political hegemony isn't entirely revisionist.
| michpoch wrote:
| How exactly did you tie the US constitution to democracy and
| then that to US hegemony influencing spread of democracy?
|
| Democracy as a concept has nothing to do with US. US had one
| of the first constitutions, but the concept did exist before.
| justinator wrote:
| The US was an early example of the idea of a democratically
| elected government, and just so happened to come about by
| fighting, then winning a war against not only a monarchy,
| but arguably the most powerful monarchy that has ever
| existed. Before that, democracy seemed perhaps a good idea,
| but you're going to have naysayers who want to see a proven
| example. Proven track records are why anyone listens to
| anybody when it comes to influence.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The answer to that question was in the first sentence, and
| you could easily look up articles that explore the idea in
| greater detail. Here is one: https://www.pbs.org/native-
| america/blogs/native-voices/how-t...
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The argument that contact with and spreading knowledge about
| Indian (as Mann settles on calling them, after evidently being
| repeatedly dressed down by actual indigenous folks for trying
| to use more currently-PC terms) societies and systems of
| government played a major role in kicking off enlightenment
| political thinking isn't so far fetched.
|
| I don't recall his claiming that they had military tech that
| was anywhere near as developed as Europeans, and most of his
| coverage of thriving, complex, urbanized (by the global
| standards of the time) societies in the Precolumbian Americas
| is focused south of the Rio, for the simple reason that that's
| where most of those seem to have been (though he does cover
| Cahokia and related sites in the modern US, as well)
|
| The closest I recall him coming to claiming Native Americans
| were more advanced than Europeans was that Europeans simply
| failed to recognize some patterns and practices as deliberate
| and well-considered, as was the case with certain crop
| management patterns in the Eastern forests and heavy use of
| fire-as-a-land-management-tool all over the continent. But
| that's not exactly a claim that they were more advanced. Oh,
| and he does mention repeated contemporary reports that the
| natives seemed remarkably tall and able-bodied compared to
| Europeans, and makes some efforts to figure out why that might
| have been (and some of that does tie back into government and
| social structures)
|
| I'm fairly sensitive to bullshit revisionism of the "noble
| savage" and/or "ackshually Europeans were the backwards
| primitives" sort, and didn't get either vibe at all from Mann's
| _1491_ or _1493_. In fact he explicitly counters the former in
| a lot of ways, similar to what you see in anti-noble-savage
| works like _War Before Civilization_.
| chrchr wrote:
| Regarding military power, Mann does argue, IIRC, that the gap
| wasn't as large as might be supposed. He also argues that the
| conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas by small forces of
| Spanish conquistadors was not enabled by military superiority
| but rather by upsetting existing political balance. In both
| cases, the conquistadors aligned with subjugated factions
| within the existing imperial systems to overthrow the
| dominant power. E.g., in Mexico, Moctezuma had captured and
| imprisoned Cortez and his forces and could have easily wiped
| them out. The emperor's delay ultimately allowed Cortez to
| align with vassal states, and that alliance overthrew the
| empire. That's not to say that the Aztec empire's military
| was the equal of Spain's, but Cortez's small band of
| conquistadors would not have defeated the Aztecs head-to-
| head.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Right. It's not that the military tech wasn't better, it's
| that, given the massive logistical advantages of indigenous
| Americans (consider what a supply chain looked like for
| even a tiny European force in the Americas!), the role of
| disease-induced chaos putting much of indigenous society &
| politics into something resembling death convulsions before
| many of them even saw Europeans, plus some straight
| realpolitik "heads I win, tails you lose" moves from the
| Europeans, it was a pretty minor factor in the whole thing.
| _Just_ the weapon-tech advantage wouldn 't have been
| anywhere near enough for the conquest to go even as
| smoothly as it did, thanks largely to the logistics
| disadvantage of the Europeans (and the conquest wasn't
| terribly smooth, anyway--Europeans lost plenty of battles
| over a span of centuries before mostly subjugating the
| Americas).
| Khelavaster wrote:
| One of my favorite history books, as well as it's sequel 1493.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| The book was an expansion of the essay Mann wrote for The
| Atlantic, and you can read that essay online [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30...
| kerblang wrote:
| Also recommending this essay:
| https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hiding-plain-sigh...
| - in reference to
|
| > the present worldwide movement toward democracy owes not to
| Locke or Newtonian physics, but to Indians, "living, breathing
| role models of human liberty."
|
| Of special interest is the man Kandiaronk, a native american.
|
| Edit: Just noticed Graeber is bickering with Mann in that
| essay!
| StevePerkins wrote:
| The sequel "1493", about the local and global impacts following
| Columbus' landing, is even more fascinating.
| jussaying2 wrote:
| Along the same, er, vein, check out _The Open Veins Of Latin
| America_ - it 's a painstakingly well-researched and fiery book
| on the colonization and exploitation of Latin America for its
| resources, under the guise of "taming the primitives". It also
| documents the attempts of the US in sabotaging popular, labour-
| led/socialist movements, nearly always successful and often
| involving the use of violence, all in the name of "fostering
| democracy".
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I was walking in the New Mexican desert this Christmas and
| finding painted pottery shards that date to a little before
| Columbus arrived. It felt so powerful to touch something that
| existed before then and think what their lives must have been
| like before the arrival of Columbus and everything changing.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I keep wondering how these civilizations might have developed
| if we'd discovered them in, say, 1900 instead of 1500s.
|
| Or what if Columbus did land on the American shores, but never
| made it back to Europe, and the native Americans got their
| hands on European technology and figured out how to recreate
| it.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| > I keep wondering how these civilizations might have
| developed if we'd discovered them in, say, 1900 instead of
| 1500s.
|
| (presumably unpopular opinion, people love to signal)
|
| This honestly feels like mashup of "i think
| colonialism/columbus is bad" signaling and that Africa is a
| tech hub in parallel universe pipedreaming.
|
| There's a pile of recently discovered cultures in Amazonia
| and they're not exactly competing with NASA... which begs the
| question why you'd expect anything resembling a hockey stick
| progress for that hypothetical, aside from doubling down on
| columbus bad thesis.
| ss108 wrote:
| "Columbus bad" isn't really a "thesis", it's a fact.
|
| But yeah, it's against the evidence to think native
| american societies could have posed any meaningful defense
| or offense against old world countries.
|
| Have you read 1491 and 1493. I have, and they are a couple
| of the most eye-opening books I have read.
| paisawalla wrote:
| > "Columbus bad" isn't really a "thesis", it's a fact.
|
| Bad compared to who? Whatever faults you'd lay at his
| feet were not only _de rigueur_ for both Europeans and
| Muslims of his time, but exceeded in many dimensions of
| savagery by the indigenous cultured he encountered. At
| any rate, disease and lack of immunity was far and away
| the agent of the demise of the natives, not Columbus or
| those who followed him over the centuries.
|
| > Have you read 1491 and 1493. I have, and they are a
| couple of the most eye-opening books I have read.
|
| Have you read Rousseau? The man never met a native
| American, and what accounts he read of their lives were
| certainly exaggerations, if not fabrications. In his own
| life, he was notoriously irresponsible. He fathered and
| abandoned for the orphanage -- a death sentence in those
| days -- five children. He was habitually leeching off
| friends and nobles who were susceptible to his charms,
| until he exhausted their patience and good will,
| including by _e.g._ seducing their wives at times.
|
| In short, he was a scoundrel, and he saw in the the story
| of the natives something which he desperately wanted for
| himself, but which wasn't there: the possibility of a
| life free from societal constraint, obligations to be
| decent, to use one's life productively, to be responsible
| for others, to live morally. The man confabulated for the
| natives a lifestyle free of the bonds under which he
| chafed in France -- and we have been laboring under his
| romantic "noble savage" delusion ever since.
|
| I mention all this to say, anyone who would read about
| the lives of natives would do well to read a little
| Rousseau, then read a little about the man, and mentally
| _subtract_ his influence which is virtually omnipresent
| in all subsequent popular thought about natives.
|
| TLDR; nobody wants to consider that the colonel may have
| been the good guy in Avatar, and Sully a delusional
| loner.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| They most likely would have become insular like china and
| stagnated similarly. Best scenario would be something
| like a south vs north dual empire constellation, locked
| into a cold war that eggs them ever onward.
|
| But we will never know, because they did not produce a
| culture that could compete. Even with time to prepare,
| alot of these cultures abandoned advanced tech
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_of_Japan) and
| supressed the "foreign" as the local elites felt there
| oligarchies threatened by those strange foreigners. I
| guess the usual attempts were made to encooperate the
| threat, by offering small kingdoms, slaves and positions
| within the ruling religion. It did not really work out,
| as disease crumbled the civilizations to dust.
|
| The other "prepared" culture (north american indians who
| met the vikings) did not take any lesson from that
| encounter either, because the tales of strange boats with
| christian raiders were not kept in writing and
| information was not exchanged with neighbors, with which
| they were locked in ritualistic inter-tribal warfare.
| Which is the main problem. The lack of information
| storage and exchange, due to a missing central culture.
|
| Africa had the longest time to acclimate to western
| intrusion, and did so by selling its own people as goods.
| The few things they did take over were weapons (used for
| slave trading and inter tribal warfare), the only
| candidates for organized resistance was the islamic world
| (who had writtings, a specialized labour system
| (industrial precursors) and centralized structures), but
| they were & are locked in by thee own cultural problems.
| Only exception were the persians, which were and are the
| france/us of the region.
|
| The chinese almost colonized africa, but then gave it up
| as a foolish endeavor, due to internal problems
| (starvation caused unrest) which was mostly due to there
| industrial revolution never reaching critical mass, which
| was mostly due to centralized culture/geography
| preventing technological competition aka harmony).
|
| There is good fiction on the topic
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt,
| but you need basically a geographical reactor europes
| eternal boiling empire pot, with a progress state saving
| device attached (netherlands and england, some italian
| states were the scientists fled towards and from), to
| reach the critical mass. The ingredients were
| omnipresent, but the permanence of the societal reaction
| was hard to get critical.
| e2le wrote:
| They would still likely suffer heavy losses due to disease
| and infection they have no immunity for.
| mathattack wrote:
| The outcome is the same. They lacked our weapons and
| immunizations- it would have been hard to catch up in
| parallel with the Western world. Look at Japan in the 1850s.
| The isolation of the prior few centuries hurt them.
| ertian wrote:
| Japan is still and independent country full of Japanese
| people, who held their own against Western militaries
| within decades of opening. That's a _very_ different from
| the apocalyptic collapse followed by replacement of the New
| World.
|
| Of course, there's a huge difference between the two: Japan
| always had some contact with the Old World, and with Old
| World diseases in particular. America would probably have
| faced the same wave of disease, even if discovery had
| happened much later.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Were there any positive effects of the long isolation in
| the case of Japan?
| credit_guy wrote:
| In an indirect way. (warning: following is highly
| speculative)
|
| - being isolated made Japan backward. Also, Japan does
| not have natural resources, and is not an agricultural
| powerhouse. This meant Japan was not a juicy target for
| the colonial powers.
|
| - Still, given enough time, one of them would surely have
| snatched it
|
| - Japan figured out the point above, and decided to not
| become a colony. It industrialized at a furious pace
| until it became a half-decent military power
|
| - huge stroke of luck, or something else, but Japan
| destroys a Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905, and
| leapfrogs into the ranks of Great Powers
|
| - they further gain a lot in WW1 by sitting on the
| sidelines, and eventually joining the winning side
|
| - this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the
| most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with
| the 800 pound gorilla
|
| - this fight does not go well, predictably, so Japan ends
| up under US occupation for 7 years
|
| - another huge stroke of luck: US, instead of sending
| Japan back to the stone age in retribution, decides to
| help Japan rebuild, and pumps massive amounts of aid
|
| - Japan goes through a second incredibly fast bout of
| industrialization
|
| This story ends around 1990.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Sister comment was made about Tsushima
|
| >- this goes to their head, and they proceed to do the
| most foolish thing at Perl Harbor, and pick a fight with
| the 800 pound gorilla
|
| We in the US knew we would be getting involved in the war
| and had done things like oil embargo/trade disruption.
| The reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was because
| Yamamoto thought the only chance they stood against the
| US was to win such a decisive battle that we would not be
| able to fight them. He was trying this again at Midway(I
| believe) but we had broken their Coms so we were able to
| out maneuver them.
|
| Edit Add: As to if their isolation was helpful or not, I
| think that it allowed them to preserve and strengthen
| their culture both the good and bad aspects of it.
|
| I think that if a country was to close themselves off and
| turn inward, it could result in good things as long as
| they have an internal forces that prevents stagnation.
|
| Or to put it another way, progress only seems to happen
| when there are driving forces, such as competing groups.
| A strong government i.e. Dictator by nature has to wield
| control in order to stay in power, in doing so any
| competing groups must be eliminated as they a a threat to
| power. This brings about stagnation.
| pasabagi wrote:
| > huge stroke of luck, or something else .. Tsushima
|
| This is very much underselling how outclassed the
| Russians were on every level of this engagement, except
| in terms of sheer number of ships (they had more), and
| technology, which was roughly on par.
|
| I think the 'isolation' was pretty advantageous in the
| sense that they managed to preserve their governmental
| and cultural structures for a very long time without the
| disruptive influence of western money and might. I
| imagine if they had let the Europeans in, the eventual
| fall of the Shogunate, partly caused by a proxy war
| between the French and the British (who supported
| different Daimyo), partly caused by public
| dissatisfaction about foreign incursion, would have been
| much earlier.
|
| That would have put them in a much less coherent and
| consequently weaker postion to resist European
| colonization efforts in the modern era.
| paisawalla wrote:
| You may enjoy "The Years of Rice and Salt," by Kim Stanley
| Robinson.
| hirundo wrote:
| It has surprised me that the majority of pottery shards I find
| in the New Mexico desert are painted. The unpainted ones are
| the exceptions. So these must not have been special ceremonial
| pots, but for every day use. The fact that the pueblo people
| put such a high value on decoration for everyday objects is
| fascinating. I think of aboriginals as utilitarians struggling
| to survive. But if you're taking the time to decorate normal
| pots, survival must be relatively assured.
|
| I'd like to exchange lives with someone who made those pots for
| a for a few weeks, and compare notes. I wonder if I have more
| or less free time than they do.
| comte7092 wrote:
| >I think of aboriginals as utilitarians struggling to
| survive.
|
| Grouping all pre Colombian Native Americans into one bucket
| is akin to talking about "Africa" as one indistinguishable
| place today. There was a massive diversity of societies and
| cultures that spanned the continent with trading networks
| that crisscrossed the continent as well.
|
| Most European account of initial contact tend to describe a
| life of relative abundance, people certainly weren't
| struggling to survive any more than your average 15th century
| European.
| themantra514 wrote:
| Pottery, painted pottery, and mycelium derived materials are
| all the craze nowadays because it's "green & organic" etc.
|
| It would be interesting to consider other aspects from pre-
| Columbus times that we should consider integrating in our daily
| life.
| botswana99 wrote:
| This really shook up my worldview when I read it. American
| history as told in my schooling was about a vast empty with an
| occasional violent native.
|
| This is not what happened
|
| I read this book twice. I recommend 1493 and his latest book
| 'wizard and prophet' as well. His twitter is also interesting
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| What's the bit about the Aztec and Mayans not having Markets?
| theironhammer wrote:
| [dead]
| russdill wrote:
| Given that European epidemics literally decimated the native
| population and the military marched many of the remaining
| natives to reservations that is the reality that most settlers
| encountered.
| Tagbert wrote:
| In my American schools we did learn more about North American
| natives though it was often through the point of view of
| European explorers and colonists. We got the usual stories
| about interactions with Jamestown/Pocahontas and Mayflower
| colonists /Squanto. There was more about Ponce de Leon and
| Coronado and the peoples they encountered. We got more details
| about the Aztec, Maya, and Olmec. I also remember sections
| about the mound builders and the Iroquois Confederacy. There
| were lessons on the American westward expansion and the
| conflicts that caused though I suspect that was downplayed a
| bit. The only South American people we studied were the Inca.
|
| Obviously that misses whole sections of the continents.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| A chilling realization that follows from this picture is that
| the inhabitants of North America encountered by most of the
| Europeans who came later were more or less the post-apocalyptic
| remnants of once large civilizations that had already collapsed
| in a continent wide pandemic.
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