Family members, who know of my interest in plants, encouraged
me to read 1491: New Revelations of the
Americas Before Columbus. 1491 is
written by journalist Charles C. Mann, and published by Alfred A. Knopf (2005).
Not only am I a fan of plants, but I’m interested in anthropology, archeology, and
history. In the 1970s, my husband (then boyfriend) and I took a college tour of
Mesoamerican, visiting many archeological sites. The book brought back great memories
of travelling by tour bus with friends and our Cultural Anthropology professor, Dr. Vince Gil, from Mexico City to Cancun, staying in inexpensive
hotels with Old World charm, and exploring fantastic ruins.
The book provides a “fly over” of the Americas before
Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1942. Mann’s thesis is that the Americas
have been populated much longer than anyone thought (possibly 30,000 years
rather than 10,000), and probably in greater numbers. Civilizations were more
advanced than thought, in many cases exceeded civilizations in Europe during
comparable time periods. They were using the concept of zero long before
Europeans, they developed sophisticated textiles (cloth was so tightly woven,
that layers of cloth could be used as armor), and they recorded events and
accounts using ropes and a series of knots in an almost binary approach. European
culture borrowed ideas and technology from interactions with Asia and Africa, whereas
culture in the Americas developed independently, often developing unique
solutions to technological problems. Since history is written by the conqueror
and Europeans assumed their culture was superior, many of the achievements of
the Americas were poorly recorded or even destroyed.
Immunities to disease also developed independently, making
the populations in the Americas vulnerable to disease carried by European
explorers and their livestock. Mann proposes that disease, from early
encounters between people in the Americas and European explorers, destroyed
much of the population. Later waves of European explorers encountered fewer
people and unpopulated land, causing the false impression that the land had
always been unpopulated, wild, and pristine. In reality, populations in the
Americas had been sculpting the environment for their needs for thousands of
years. Mann’s ideas are controversial in the field, but fascinating to read.
As expected, I was especially interested in some of the
horticultural aspects of the book. The beautiful botanical gardens of Tenochtitlan
amazed the European explorers in the early 1500s, and may have inspired
the Padua Botanical garden of Italy – one of the first of its kind in Europe. The soil
in the Amazonian rainforest is extremely poor, but the Amazonians had been
engineering terra preta soil of
charcoal, pottery chards, and other organic material to create rich fields of
productive soil that could support large population centers. The terraced
fields of Peru, high in the mountains, also supported large population centers.
Corn, beans, squash, cacao, potatoes, and peppers originated in the Americas, some of
which were the product of selective breeding programs over thousands of years.
No comments:
Post a Comment