1. What did you like?

This article was a fantastic choice. I pasted it into Word to be able to copy and paste for my contribution and it landed at a whopping 17 pages in 12-point font!

Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that in their opinion this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind.

I went to school in Central Africa in the 1980’s, so in between the author’s schooling and his son’s and I also learned exactly the same thing.

How does such wrong history clichés travel so efficiently and so far across such different cultures, continents, languages and educational systems?

My mind was blown a subsequent time by the following statement:

Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

Incredible, and at the same time, perfectly credible, logical and like-a-club-between-the-eyes-why-hadn’t-anyone-thought-of-this-before-face-palm…

Mind blown a third time by the disease sweeping through the continent at such a rapid pace that millions of native inhabitants were decimated by disease they had never heard of, propagated hundreds of miles away from them, brought by people they had never seen and would never meet:

What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so. (…) From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died—the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.

I also loved learning that Indians had domesticated the following animals:

Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close quarters with animals—they domesticated only the dog, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the Muscovy duck.

I found it interesting that they had domesticated dogs as well, and I am embarrassed to say I was surprised to hear there were dogs in North America before the (Colonization? Invasion? Occupation?) arrival of Europeans. I did not know that.

I think one of the things I liked the most was the complete unanswerability of the initial premise: Is there anything we know for sure? Any numbers that are undisputed by anyone from that era or is it all estimation? The whole article hinges on this question. What was the reality of 1491? Were there millions of Indians or not?

"It's an absolutely unanswerable question on which tens of thousands of words have been spent to no purpose," Henige says. (…)"But as for how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to something like that—applying large figures like ninety-five percent—we're saying things we shouldn't say. The number implies a level of knowledge that's impossible."

Mind blown a fifth time:

When he (Henry Brackenridge) got there (in 1810), trudging along the desolate Cahokia River, he was "struck with a degree of astonishment." Rising from the muddy bottomland was a "stupendous pile of earth," vaster than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Around it were more than a hundred smaller mounds, covering an area of five square miles.

I was enchanted to discover Alfred Crosby, a historian at the University of Texas’ analysis of the two Neolithic “centers of invention” and I will be definitely be following up on this line of inquiry:

Human history, in Crosby's interpretation, is marked by two world-altering centers of invention: the Middle East and central Mexico, where Indian groups independently created nearly all of the Neolithic innovations, writing included.

I knew which crops were indigenous to America but this, again, completely surprised me. To hear it in such clear graphic, numerical terms was a real awakening:

Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas.

Another thing that opened my eyes was this:

The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. (…) They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.)

How amazing is it that with information and data you gain perspective that opens your eyes to new points of view? This is something that consistently makes me feel grateful to know about r/AskHistorians and r/History. Mindblown.

This was interesting to me, living in a Tropical area as well:

According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, "lots" of botanists believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia." The phrase "built environment," Erickson says, "applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes."

2. What did you dislike?

• In an article shedding so much light on Native peoples and cultures of North America and destroying destructive long-held clichés in the Americas’ history and anthropology cultures, I was a little disappointed to hear such a sweeping and simple generalization of Africa (as a whole, too, not making any difference between West and Central Africa) and a currently-disputed fact, “Quarrelsome societies helped slave traders siphon off millions of people”. We recently had a great discussion on r/AskHistorians about this, and it was discussed that this “participation of Africans in slavery is what drove slavery to be as popular and effective as it was” is, in fact, as much a cliché as the “Indians were so few in number and so ecological that they didn’t affect the natural landscape of the Americas in their thousands of years of living there”.

The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British were alarmed by the death rate among Indians, because they wanted to exploit them as workers. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent's quarrelsome societies helped slave traders to siphon off millions of people.

• I didn’t enjoy the back and forth with the Beni area in South America. I just wanted to stay in 1491 and didn’t enjoy being brought back to the current day. That is entirely subjective though.

3. What did you not understand?

Nothing comes to mind

4. What was explained really well?

The catastrophic impact of European arrival. The drop in population, the spread of disease, Dobyn’s theories.

5. Did you notice any problems or issues in the premise/methodology/sources/etc?

I didn’t.

6. What would you like to know more about?

• Why were the Europeans so sick compared to the Indians? Europeans brought smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough, later cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever and Indians had parasites, tuberculosis, and anemia, but the two are quite out of balance…

• Are there any Native-American anthropologists and historians that are “low-counters”?

• An environmentalist I once met a long time ago told me that in the 15th century, the forests in North America were so dense that a squirrel could hop in a tree in Chicago and make it to Seattle without ever touching the ground. I was wondering if there was any truth to this based on the quote below:

By 1800 the hemisphere was chockablock with new wilderness. If "forest primeval" means a woodland unsullied by the human presence, William Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the late eighteenth century than in the early sixteenth.

Edit: Formatting

That was a wonderful, informative and thoroughly entertaining article. Sine the substance of the history has been talked about at length already, with brilliant clarifications and nuancing by /u/anthropology_nerd and /u/Mictlantehultli, I'm gonna raise two broader points the article got me thinking about.

• Historical demographics: Many of the figures in the article, particularly in the first half, really got my blood boiling, as I'm a big believer in not doing big, overarching population estimates based on crappy, fragmented or absent data. Some of the low-counters arguments about the exponentially rising margins of error and the layers upon layers of assumptions being extremely dangerous and misleading is something I totally agree with. Given that the trend seems to be moving away from big numbers to nuancing the demographic impact geographically, does this big picture accuracy still matter in the debate? And more generally, what do people think about demographic estimates in pre-modern history? Are they ever useful/accurate/a good idea?

• Pop-history: Frankly I think this is a wonderful piece of history writing for a popular audience. While Mann obviously doesn't get everything right, and gets a bit carried away on the monocausal disease explaination, as others have pointed out, he writes wonderfully well and draws the reader in, intrigues us and the delivers mind-blowing sucker-punches at regular intervals. It feels more like a movie than history at times. I think the key to this is that we're not being given a narrative of what happened (as we so often get in history for non-academic audiences) but a narrative of discovery and debate. We, the reader, get to see how all the jigsaw pieces fit together. This is extremely hard to do, as evidenced by all the bad history out there, and when you find it it's great to see. Do you agree? Thoughts on what makes this (and/or other pieces of pop-history) effective?

1491 is what got me interested in Mesoamerican archaeology and set me on the path where I'm at now. I think I read the book twice in high school and once more in undergrad, but I haven't read it since. This book has incorporated almost all of this article as far as I can remember, which is not a bad thing. What the book does, though, is expand a lot on many of these topics. But after reading through this article with the knowledge I have now since I first read it, some things have jumped out at me.

It is Erickson's belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago.

I completely glossed over this when I read the book. It was only after reading this article I realized that I've read a number of Erickson's works on earthworks in Bolivia and they are great and fascinating articles. His work since 2002 has held up in my eyes and I don't know how anyone could doubt that people occupied this region and put in the time, effort, and labor into constructing these causeways and islands.

The Spaniards arrived, and then Indians died—in huge numbers, at incredible rates. It hit him, Dobyns told me recently, "like a club right between the eyes."

I really hope that /u/anthropology_nerd can chime in about the population debate and tell us how the debate has changed since 2002 or even 2006 when the book was first published.

A Jesuit reported that the "Savages" were disgusted by handkerchiefs: "They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground."

This made me laugh because handkerchiefs have always disgusted me. I just don't understand the practice!

They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison.

This is something I think a lot of people have trouble understanding and I don't blame them. If you're so used to one system and see so many other people practice that same system, something like this could be so foreign that you fail to see it for what it was.

The dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it has featured vituperative references to colonialism, elitism, and employment by the CIA.

lol. I feel as though I have just missed this period in academia because I never really heard of these kinds of disputes. I'm sure they are out there, even within archaeology, but I guess the people I know don't participate in this sort of thing anymore? I don't know, maybe others have had other experiences than me.

The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material."

I don't remember reading this in the book, but as I said it has been awhile. If anyone has studied more on terra preta and could comment on this I would greatly appreciate it.

Is there anyone here that could elaborate on terra petra? The article makes it sound like it was just the sour-dough equivalent of soil, but the book describes it as so much more than that. There was a process of doing a prolonged controlled burn of the jungle (it wasn't just simple slash and burn), and it was filled with pottery fragments. That was actually one of the details that fascinated me the most in the book. How large are these fragments? In the book he's able check the soil at the airport and identify it as terra petra by its pottery content. How exactly did these pottery fragments get into the soil? He describes every other aspect of terra petra's creation as very much willfully directed by humans, were they also intentionally mixing in the pottery fragments? Or was this just the run off from their communities adjacent to the farms?

Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

His discussion of Native populations in the America's is fascinating. Similarly, his discussion of their massive population collapse following the appearance of Europeans is equally horrifying. In the article, and also in the book, he makes a very compelling case for the horrific effects of European diseases on Native populations. However, one of the things that has surprised me on this subreddit is the degree of animosity that this "virgin soil" hypothesis generates. It seems that people dislike blaming disease for the Native population decline because it allows Europeans to escape moral culpability? Do the people against the virgin soil hypothesis claim that disease played less of a role in population decline? Or do they just not want to focus on it? Is there evidence that disease played less of a role?

I liked the general premise of the article, which to me was that pre 1492 America was more populated and rich than it is often credited to be. I believe the evidence has been shifting in this direction for quite some time. No one knows what the exact population density of NA was prior to European arrival, but the idea that the native americans were merely hunter gatherers or totally primitive should be laid to rest.

There were massive societies in central mexico, are we really to believe that this was impenetrable to North America by the Rio Grande Valley? Considering the first-hand accounts of early Europeans in the article, praising the Native Americans for their expansive farming and evidently high quality of living, that doesn’t appear to be a tenable position. It seems much more likely that revisionist history, motivated by manifest destiny, was involved.

I also liked the fact that the achievements of Native Americans were discussed. Terra Preta, Cahoika, the cultivation of Maize. Certainly these societies had a lot going on. Ultimately, they did not best the Europeans in warfare and were evidently laid waste by disease. But the scope of their achievements does make you wonder. Perhaps more focus should be placed on studying the native americans in United States history.

There is an Academic thought that the idea that history is a story of continued progress and success is a myth. While we do have much to be thankful for, especially in America, you can see that societies were thriving (and probably falling) long before Europeans arrived to “enlighten” them. The fact that advanced societies existed and were destroyed in America doesn’t prove that to be true but it certainly changes the narrative, especially for United States history.

Finally for my positives, I loved the discussion of the Amazon. What an interesting topic! Places in ancient times that had great population densities than today are so fascinating. Socieites, and life, are so complex.

One thing I would like to see more discussion of is the mortality rates by disease of the native americans. There were some arguments presented, and I’m far from a biologist, but the question of why they were so high is left somewhat open. I think there’s room for exploration there.

Another thing I wasn’t a huge fan of was the idea floated that the Terra Preta is a wonder drug that can fix the environment. It seems like a cool and useful technology, and it’s amazing that it was developed by societies we didn’t even think existed. However, the idea that it was a miracle envioronmental fix that will help modern society tremendously is wishful thinking at best. Our environmental problems are massive and varied, certainly not limited to soil depletion. It would be interesting to see a more in depth discussion of it, but with less unrealistic expectations for it.

So a bunch of people have raised some great points, but there are still some things to add!

One thing that struck me is, well, how uncontroversial much of what he was writing felt. The article is about 15 years old, and the debate it engages with going on for a few decades by then, but now, in 2016, maybe it is just the bubble I'm in, but the population debate seems pretty settled. I've seen different numbers certainly, but I'm hard pressed to think of anything I've read which would say pre Columbian population was only a few million. I'm not sure whether Mann, this article, and the ensuing book are part of the reason for that or not, but am very interested in trying to find out, as it seems plausible.

Another thing, but more just an interesting aside, was the parallels with a favorite book of mine, The Lost City of Z. To cut to the chase, the author makes the argument of a civilization in the Amazon region, the fabled city of the title, and possible evidence found in modern times that evaded the eye of the protagonist of the book. This fit in well with Mann's discussion, I thought, of similar evidence for large scale inhabitation in regions now seeming like they never could have supported such populations.

Are there any good images of these amazonian tree mounds? Are they visually convincing? I tried googling the area in question and it didn't seem overwhelmingly obvious that they were man-made.

I've really enjoyed the discussion so far otherwise and agree with everyone's sentiment. I've read a very small part of the book (ages ago) and this article and was weirdly struck, as others have mentioned, by both how mind blowing this felt as well as, as /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov mentioned, how uncontroversial this all seems.

One issue that it raised with me, being from Massachusetts, is how little I know about the colonial and pre-colonial history of my own area. Is there anything good that deals with Massachusetts/New England pre-colonial/early-colonial history in particular at anywhere near this level of readability?

Charles C. Mann's work really blew me away and is really important for several reasons.

First, specialized anthropology and archeology texts can be difficult to downright impossible to understand if you aren't familiar with the field's terminology, as is to be expected with any specialized discipline, social science or no. Often times the best we can hope for are pop-history translations which sensationalize existing research to the point of fundamentally misrepresenting it. Mann achieves the difficult balance of both making existing research both comprehensible and interesting, on the one hand, and attempting to keep his writing faithful to the actual evidence, on the other. All done with excellent prose.

Second, because even those of us who research the Americas often come out of our university courses not really understanding much about the indigenous peoples of the continent. I was recently shocked while reading J.H. Elliot's Imperial Spain when I discovered that he explained the conquest of the Aztecs and other major indigenous civilizations through the warrior spirit and religious zeal of the conquistadors, instead of the tens of thousands of indigenous allies who both provided supplies and fought alongside European invaders. In Cuba the indigenous peoples aren't really referenced after, maybe, the mid-16th century, despite surviving well into later periods (they seem to have since become fully assimilated and no longer exist as a distinct people). Mann is bringing attention to the 1492 Americas without a) fetishizing/idealizing them or b) establishing some kind of moralistic tale of inevitability. He tells us the story of this world, how it functioned, and how its people worked and lived so that we can understand it as it really was, according to up to date research. That's really important.

Wow. Thank you for both answers.