| 1491 - New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005) |
| Front Cover | Book Details | ||||||||||||||
|
|
| Description |
| "A study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492." "Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus's landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong." "In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions."--BOOK JACKET. |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Notes/Review |
| It's only natural to me that many of the things I learned in high school physics class are outdated. It's easy for me to accept that we've created new machines that aid in our discovery of the universe we inhabit, that we can delve deeper into subatomic particles, peer farther into deepest space; develop and refine our understanding of the mosaic of creation. It's not so natural to me that nearly everything I learned about pre-Columbian history of the Americas in elementary school, in high school, even as an adult, is wrong. We haven't built any machines (time machines?) that illuminate the cultures, activities, and relationships of the inhabitants of the western hemisphere in the centuries and millennia prior to 1492. Rewriting history isn't a matter of deciphering the results of an experiment in the super collider. It involves much more guesswork. It's perhaps more like putting together a jigsaw puzzle missing most of its pieces and with no picture to go from. The author is not an archeologist or anthropologist or linguist or environmentalist but a journalist. This works well for me. The topics are wide ranging and the language of the book is, for the most part, devoid of technical terms. Mann relates for us the current state of the science (as of 2005) and when necessary tells us that there are other possibilities and why these alternatives may be correct. I found the book fascinating. So much has changed, or, rather, so much of our understanding has changed during the last few decades that I'm curious what has been learned since this book was published. Will I be able to find a similar book in a few years that describes that jigsaw puzzle and how it's changed since 2005? ========================= Book Description: Very Good: Cover and pages show some wear from reading and storage. May have light creases on the cover and binding. Book Condition: Very Good Book Price: US$ 6.52 Shipping Price: US$ 0.00 |