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A Conversation with Charles C. Mann

Although this book had its origins in an Atlantic Monthly cover story, what was it that
first drew you to the subject?
Two things, I think. More than twenty years ago, I wrote an article for Science (I'm a
correspondent for the journal's news division) that involved going to the Yucatan
peninsula. I visited some of the Maya ruins there and like so many other people was
absolutely fascinated. I'd just spent two years living in Rome, and I was struck by how
much more extensivebut equally finely builtthe Maya ruins were. I also was
astonished by how different the aesthetic system wasthe vertiginous staircases, the
corbel arches, the huge reliefs, etc.
This dovetailed with something else. The summer before seventh grade, my parents
moved from the suburbs of Detroit to the Pacific Northwest, an area where the
presence of Native Americans seemed much more evident. I was fascinated by the
idea that very different peoples had lived in the area in the not too distant past, and
that their descendants were still living nearby. But it wasn't until I got to Yucatan that
the penny dropped and I grasped, really and truly, that when Columbus landed he had
stumbled across an entire **hemisphere** full of people whose cultures had nothing to
do with Europe or Asia. Half the world!
It was kind of a Homer Simpson-ish "d'oh!" moment for me. So was realizing that I
knew practically nothing about this entire half of the world, and my teachers in school
had known practically nothing about it. I decided I would try to find out more when I
could.
The book argues that most of what we learned at school about the first people to
inhabit the Western Hemisphere is wrong. (We now know that Indians were in the
Americas far longer and in far greater numbers than previously believed.) What do you
think is the most startling aspect of this re-examination by scientists?
As I was writing the book, friends and acquaintances asked me about what I was
working on. Usually, they seemed most surprised when I told them about the extent to
which Indians modified the environment. We're taught in schoolor, at any rate, I was
taught in schoolthat for all intents and purposes the Americas were a wilderness in
1492, and that is simply not true.
When I tell people that Indians created large chunks of the prairies the pioneers saw
by burning down the forests that covered them, they're usually pretty surprised. But
you can look in the colonial accounts yourself. Most of those nice deciduous forests
that now carpet Ohio and Illinois and the Texas Hill Country didn't exist 400 years ago
they were savannas. My favorite example, though, is the Colca Valley in Peru, which
is like South America's Grand Canyon, except that it's much deeper. The big difference
is that most of the canyon is full of agricultural terraces that date back as much as a
thousand years. Imagine terracing the Grand Canyon!
You write that as the native people have disappeared, the distinction today between
anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. Are there problems with that?
Not necessarily. It simply means that cultural anthropologists (who study present-day
societies) need to be well informed about their subjects' usually turbulent recent
history, and archaeologists (who study past societies) should try to be as informed as
possible about what the descendants of their subjects are doing.
What do you think of the recent scientific study of the "Kennewick Man" who's thought
to be 9,000 years old? One reason he may be significantand this is part of your book

is that he furthers the idea that rather than migrating by foot across the Bering
Straits 13,000 years ago, many peoples probably traveled by boat. How did this work
and how accepted is this theory now?
The conventional picturethat paleo-Indians (the ancestors of today's Indians) walked
across the Bering Strait 12,000 years agohas been under persistent attack for a
couple decades. One problem is that after walking across the strait, which scientists
believe was surprisingly hospitable, the paleo-Indians would then have run into the
2,000-mile-long ice sheets that then covered Canada and the northern United States.
For a while, geologists believed that the sheets partially melted at just the right time,
creating an ice-free corridor that the paleo-Indians walked through. But now the
evidence for this corridor seems pretty weak. So how did the paleo-Indians get here?
A currently intriguing theory is that they got here by small boat, skipping along
temperate pockets on the shoreline. The pockets were due to the Japanese Current,
which still warms coastal British Columbia. There isn't much direct evidence for this
idea, but researchers are increasingly interested in it, because it is beginning to seem
like the only plausible answer.
Kennewick Man may help answer a related but different question. There is some
evidence suggesting that the Americas were settled in as many as five separate
waves, with today's Indians being in the second or third wave. It is possible that
examining Kennewick Man could give some evidence for or against this notion. He
might have been in an earlier wave, for instance, which would mean that he was not
directly ancestral to modern Indians.
Incidentally, there has been speculation that Kennewick Man was from Europe, largely
based on an early reconstruction of his face that made him look a bit like the actor
Patrick Stewart. More recent reconstructions based on better data have eliminated
that resemblance. And in any case there is no evidence that I am aware of that solidly
suggests a link to Europeand lots of evidence against it, beginning with the fact that
Indians are genetically linked with the peoples of Siberia.
Tenochtitlan, the Mexica (Aztec) capital, was more than twice as big as any European
cityas much as six times more populous than London, Rome or Madridyet the
arrival of Europeans created one of the worst disasters in history, with as much as 90
percent of its population dead within a century. What killed so many people?
One of the biggest changes in historians' understanding since the 1960s is their
knowledge of the overwhelming role played by epidemic disease. Most of the really
bad epidemic diseasessmallpox, measles, influenzawere originally diseases that
afflicted domestic animals. Measles, for example, is a variant of rinderpest, a cow
disease. Europeans lived in such close contact with their farm animals that slightly
mutated forms of their diseases were able to jump the species barrier. By a quirk of
history, the Americas had no domesticable animals to speak ofthe dog and the
llama, in the Andes, are the main exceptions. So Indians were what epidemiologists
call "virgin soil"their immune systems were utterly unprepared for these diseases
when Europeans brought them over.
The results were ghastly beyond imagining. It is widely believed that between 1500
and 1600 nine out of ten Native Americans died. Most of these people had never even
seen Europeansthe diseases raced into the interior ahead of the English, French, and
Spanish. It was the greatest demographic calamity in the history of the world.
Disease, more than anything else, let Europeans win the hemisphere. Hernan Cortes,
who conquered Tenochtitlan and the Mexica (Aztec) empire, is a good example. In
what is now called the noche triste (sad night), the Mexica drove him from the city,

killing three-quarters of his force and most of his horses. After fleeing, Cortes
supposedly collapsed in tears at the ruin of his hopes. The only reason he was able to
make good on his determination to come back is that some of his Spanish
reinforcements inadvertently brought smallpox with them. The epidemic killed at least
a third of the city's inhabitants, including the Mexica leader and much of his army.
Amazonian Indians knew how to farm the rain forest without destroying it to the point
where scientists are now studying their process today. Is there any hope this will work
and how successful where they back then?
Today when we think of farming we imagine plowed fields and large swathes of grain.
The inhabitants of the Amazon came up with entirely different ways of farming. To
begin with, they sheltered the fragile soil of the tropical forest from the punishing sun
and rain by growing most of their crops as treestwo-thirds of Amazonian crop
species, according to one survey, were trees. It was a kind of agroforestry that was
unlike anything in Europe.
Equally or more important, they developed techniques to improve the usually poor
tropical soils. The Amazon is dotted with patches of terra preta do IndiosIndian black
earthwhich has kept its vitality for generations. A Brazilian-American-German
collaboration of geographers, soil scientists, archaeologists, and agronomists is now
trying to understand the processes by which Indians created terra preta, and hopes to
apply these techniques to other poor soils in the tropics.
Why do some criticize the ideas put forth here? On the right, detractors charge that
they discredit European culture by inflating the scale of native loss here. On the left,
environmentalists want to believe that America in 1491 was "an Edenic land . . .
untrammeled by man."
I think both of these complaints derive from a peculiarly contemporary compulsion to
see everything in red-state, blue-state terms. To begin with, neither Indians or
Europeans then had a modern conception of disease. Nor did they have any real ability
to prevent the epidemics. In general, they both believed that sickness was a reflection
of the will of God. Most of the deaths, as I mentioned before, occurred among peoples
who had never seen Europeanswhich is to say that Europeans didn't even know that
they were occurring. So to claim that the epidemics magnify the culpability of
Europeans seems kind of nave to me. Don't get me wrongEuropeans did lots of bad
things to Indians. I'm just not sure how useful it is to think of the epidemics in the
same breath.
Similarly, the left tends not to like hearing that Indians heavily managed naturethey
did not "tread lightly on the land." Environmentalists fear that admitting that the
Amazon forest was largely created by human actionthat much of it is, in a sense, a
whole lot of old orchardssomehow gives the green light to the bulldozers. I don't see
it. Indians were, by and large, quite good land managers. Rather than pretending they
were not, we should study their techniques. Some of them may be useful to us, as we
face the problem of managing the land wisely.
You write that between 1616 and 1619, an epidemicpossibly viral hepatituskilled
90% of the people in coastal New England . . . in just 3 years! How did the living
survive with such a crippling loss of life?
It was devastating, of course. How could it not be? There is pretty clear evidence that
the overwhelming and inexplicable mortality plunged native society into a kind of
spiritual crisis. Had their gods failed them? Were they being punished? It was one
reason that so many Indians were interested in learning about Christianity.
Something similar happened to Europe after the Black Death, which shook Europeans'

faith in the Church. Countless schismatic movements emerged in the aftermath. Many
historians believe that one long-term consequence was the emergence of Martin
Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
You say that, if not for Pizarro and the Spanish, the Inkas "might have created a
monolithic culture as enduring as China." What specifically prevented that from
happening?
Epidemic disease was a major factor. The same plague of smallpox that overwhelmed
Tenochtitlanthe epidemic that gave the Mexica empire to Cortesswept through
Central America and into the Andes. I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but
that's because the epidemics were mind-bogglingly important in American history. This
epidemic arrived in about 1525 and killed perhaps half of the empire's population,
including the Inka emperor, his chosen successor, and much of the court. The result
was a devastating civil war for the throneruin upon ruin. Pizarro, a very lucky man,
came right after the war. A brilliant politician, he was able to play off the two factions
against each other and won early, devastating victories from which the Inka never
recovered.
Were you surprised to learn about the relative sophistication of various tribes, such as
the Olmec who may have had a 365-day calendar and invented the number zero as
early as 750 BC (but didn't use the wheel...)?
Yes, I was, at first. Later I've come to realize that cultures develop wildly unevenly, and
what comes quick and obvious to one is slow and mysterious to another. Europeans,
for instance, knew all about true arches, but the Olmec didn't. Indians understood the
engineering principles of suspension bridges centuries before Europeansfor a while
conquistadors refused to cross Indian suspension bridges, because they couldn't
understand how they could stand up without anything supporting them (must be black
magic, the Spaniards thought). The Olmec seem to have invented the zero by at least
the time of Christ and maybe much earlier, whereas Europeans didn't use it until 1700
Descartes didn't know about it, for instance. On the one hand, you think, how could
Indians not have used the wheel? On the other, you think, how could Descartesin the
running for world's smartest personnot have understood that zero was a number?
Why do you think this is all finally coming to light now and not earlier?
I'm not sure, but I'll give you my guess. Scholars of the 19th century and the first part
of the 20th wrote at a time when European nations were flattening everything before
their path. It was natural to assume that non-white peoples were history's losers,
unimportant in the scheme of things. After the Second World War, in which a nonwhite
nation (Japan) proved a difficult adversary, researchers took stock. And then when the
great European empires crumbled, they began to look again at the histories of these
other societies.
But even then the new techniques necessary to understand some of these ancient
histories were mainly confined to archaeology, geography, ecology, and other fields.
Few researchers crossed the disciplinary boundaries, so new knowledge in one field
didn't percolate to other fields. The first important articles about the devastating
impact of the epidemics appeared in the 1960s, but they were in journals like Current
Anthropology and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and history textbook-writers
didn't see them. Now, at last, some of the disciplinary barriers are coming down.
How long did the research for this book take and is there a next project for you yet?
In a way, I've been working on this book off and on since my trip to Yucatan. But I only
seriously began collecting material in the early 1990s, when I realized that somebody
should write a book about this stuff. I only dared imagine writing that book myself in
1998 or so. As for a next project, I have one in mind, but I don't want to jinx it by

talking prematurely.
Indian Country Today interview with Charles C. Mann
about his new book: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
By Peter d'Errico
Published in Indian Country Today 20 & 25 December 2005
INTRODUCTION
Charles C. Mann's new book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus , published in August by Knopf, is already a best-seller and has made the
New York Times list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year. As the Times put it, "This
sweeping portrait of pre-Columbian civilization argues that it was far more populous
and sophisticated than previously thought."
In fact, Mann's book is a blockbuster. It brings together results of the latest scientific
research that has been focused on learning about the American hemisphere before the
so-called 'discovery' by Columbus. Mann presents this research in an easy, personable
style that allows readers to understand issues and concepts in complex fields like
linguistics, genetics, carbon dating, soil geography, and epidemiology.
Combining these fields with recent findings from anthropology and archaeology, Mann
builds an overwhelming critique of conventional stereotypes of the 'new world': he
shows that the indigenous population was significantly greater and Indigenous
Societies significantly more complex than the stereotypical views present. Instead of a
few wandering groups scattered over the land, Mann shows that the latest research
documents the existence of millions of people in widespread and intricate civilizations
throughout the hemisphere, who succumbed not because they were 'inferior' to the
colonizing invaders, but because they had no immunity to the imported diseases.
Epidemics reduced whole Peoples to remnants unable to defend themselves and their
lands.
The publication of Mann's book shifts the entire paradigm of 'discovery,' colonization,
and the history of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas. This book provides the
foundation for a scientific history of the Americas. No longer do we have to base our
critique of the Bering Strait theory (or, as the late Vine Deloria, Jr., called it, the BS
theory) and all its attendant nonsense about a 'vacant land' only on our gut instincts
and traditional stories; now we can locate in one book the results of advanced Western
science that support our understandings.
https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1198/ch
arles-c-mann

Indian Country Today met Charles Mann at one of the numerous public lectures he has
been presenting in the wake of his book's publication. He graciously accepted an
invitation to participate in an interview for the newspaper, through an email exchange.
INTERVIEW
ICT: First, let us thank you for the enormously important work you have done in writing
this book. As our introduction to this interview says, we consider 1491: New

Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus to be a paradigm-shifting event.

CM: Thats very kind of you. I guess Id be more modest. I tried in my book to show
that if you take the long view how a lot of different research in different fields seems to
fit together into a single big picturea fascinating one, to my mind.
ICT: Let's start with a personal question: What motivated you to take on this huge
project?
CM: It didnt start out that way. Im a correspondent in the news division of the journal
Science . Twenty-plus years ago the journal sent me to cover a NASA expedition that
was trying to learn about the depletion of ozone layer. The scientists had a plane that
flew across the hemisphere, from way up north to way down south, sampling the
upper atmosphere. We stopped in Merida, in the Yucatan Peninsula. For some reason
the scientists had the next day off, and we all rented a VW bus to see some of the
Maya ruins. I was completely astonished by them. Id lived in Italy for a couple years,
so I knew something about the Roman ruins, and these seemed to me to be every bit
as sophisticated and beautifuland much bigger. Id learned about ancient Rome in
high school, but not about the Maya. I thought, How come this wasnt part of the
curriculum?
Over the next few years, I wangled assignments that would take me to various parts of
the Americas, and I always took a day or two extra to see ancient sites. I used the
journalists privilege to call up strangers and asked archaeologists and anthropologists
and tribal officials what to see. And over time I slowly built up a picture of what these
people thought the Americas before Columbus looked like, a picture that was
extremely different from what I had been taught in school. Then, in the 1990s, my son
was taught by his school exactly what I had been taught in my schoolideas that I
knew were three or four decades out of date. So I thought, Gee, somebody should
write a book.
ICT: As a writer, your focus has generally been on science, and you have received
prestigious awards for the best American Science Writing. How did your experience
with science writing shape your approach to the problems of pre-Columbian history?
CM: The most truthful answer to your question would be Im not sure. But let me
take a guess. Most historians are trained to work with only a few types of evidence
written documents, interviews, that kind of thing. Scientists are opportunists who will
use almost anything if it can provide solid data. To learn about the prehistory of the
Americas, one must go beyond the written record, interesting as it is, to a host of
novel techniquespollen analysis, AMS dating, ice-core sampling, hydrological
modeling, multispectra analysis, mitochondrial DNA testing, and so on. This wasnt
unfamiliar stuff to me, and so Im perhaps more comfortable with it than writers who
dont operate out of the scientific tradition.
A second way that I might have benefited is that by coming to this subject from a
background in the physical sciences, as opposed to the social sciences, is that I may
have been less inhibited by some ancient prejudgments. Of course, the downside is
that I may have made some beginners mistakes.
ICT: Your book shows many ways that modern science supports observations of the
earliest explorers and adventurers from Christian Europe, especially with regard to
indigenous population size, density, and sophistication. Did this congruence between
science and old travel diaries surprise you?

CM: Not really. To be sure, the European travelers had their own agendas (to put it
mildly) and were not always the most reliable witnesses (to say the least). Yet I would
agree with the historian Woodrow Borah, who observed that sixteenth-century
Europeans knew how to count and observe. So if a bunch of them said there were lots
of people in, say, the Amazon basin, it seemed to me that the default hypothesis
would be that there had been, in fact, a lot of people at that place. Therefore I wasnt
terribly surprised when other types of evidence seemed to confirm it.
ICT: We were surprised to learn from your book how recent major scientific findings in
many fields would not have been possible only 50 years ago. Carbon dating, for
example, was only invented as a scientific tool in the 1950s, and revolutionized
archaeology. Tell us about the kinds of new science upon which your book is based.
CM: Ive already mentioned some of them. One way to summarize the new methods
would be to say that they represent the last forty years worth of innovation in fields
such as demography, climatology, epidemiology, economics, botany, genetics, image
analysis (or whatever you call the techniques for interpreting satellite photography),
palynology (pollen analysis), molecular biology, and soil science. Also some other
fields that Ive forgotten at the moment.
ICT: One area of research you discuss is disease-related population loss. The author,
Harold Napoleon, writing about Alaska Native villages, in Yuuyaraq: the way of the
human being, wrote that people were so shocked by the "trauma of disease and the
collapse of their world" that they succumbed to colonial aggression. Can you explain
how epidemics and colonial aggression were interrelated factors in the subjugation of
Indigenous Peoples?
CM: Without epidemic diseases, Europeans would have had a much harder time taking
over the hemisphere. In fact, most of the time that Europeans tried to colonize the
Americas in the absence of epidemic disease their efforts failed, usually because local
people got tired of them and threw them out. (Im hedging here by saying most of the
time; offhand, I cant think of a contrary example, but I am sure there is one).
The famous Pilgrims are an example. Between about 1480, when European ships first
appeared off the northeastern coast and 1620, when the Pilgrims arrived, Europeans
made numerous attempts to establish permanent bases on the coast. Many were
scared off by the presence of large, populous native settlements. As for those that
triedwell, Indians repelled most of them and confined the others to small trading
outposts. In about 1617 an epidemicperhaps of viral hepatitis and certainly of
European originswept the coast of New England, killing off the great majority of its
inhabitants. Greatly weakened, the local Wampanoag reversed their previous stance
and allowed the Pilgrims to move in.
Disease probably played its greatest role in the destruction of the Triple Alliance (aka
the Aztec Empire) in central Mexico. Using a technique the Spaniards had discovered
in the Caribbean, Corts seized Motecuhzoma, the leader of the Mexica (the most
important of the three groups in the alliance). This shocked the Mexica pretty much
the way that Cromwells seizure of the English king Charles did a century later in
Britain. It took them a few months to get over it, but when the Mexica did they killed
two-thirds of the Spaniards and most of their horses and threw them out of the city.
The Mexica kicked Cortss ass, to be blunt about it.
Wounded almost each and every one, the Europeans were on the point of utter
destruction when by a stroke of fortune smallpox came in with some Spanish ships
that ended up providing reinforcements to Corts. A single sick person, an African

slave, may actually have brought in the diseasesome old documents make this
claim. Whatever the exact mechanism of transmission, the disease tore through the
countryside. Seeing that Corts and his men were immune (they had been exposed
during childhood), the Tlaxcalansthe people of a large state that had been fighting
off the Triple Alliance for decadesmade common cause with Corts. When he
returned to the attack, it was at the head of an army tens of thousands strong, and he
was attacking an enemy whose military and political leadership had been killed off,
almost to a man, by the disease. Fighting courageously, the enemies of the Triple
Alliance won this second encounter, but the only reason it occurred at all was
smallpox.
Now multiply these two stories by a hundred or a thousand and you get some idea of
the enormous consequences wreaked by European diseases when they came to the
Americas. Smallpox alone seems to kill about 40% of unvaccinated populations. If four
out of every ten Americans died today, the society would shatter. You simply couldnt
keep things goingtoo many people would have died, and with them their
accumulated knowledge. The unimaginable loss would provoke a huge spiritual crisis.
All of this happened to native societies, and it left them terribly vulnerable.
The same was true of European societies, incidentally. The Black Death convulsed the
continent, killing about one-third of the population. If Genghis Khan had attacked right
after the Black Death, the historian Alfred W. Crosby has noted, the Pilgrims would not
have spoken a European language.
ICT: Your book is notable for the fact that it is not a polemic; you present scientific
consensus on an issue, and acknowledge areas of controversy. How would you
characterize the overall situation: are we at a paradigm shift in the scientific approach
to history?
CM: I would put it this way. The evidence has built up so much that it is no longer
possible to ignore, even if one wanted to. Little of it is definitive, but all the arrows
seem to be pointing in the same direction, at least to me. And for whatever reason
non-Indians seem disposed to hear it. Many of them, anyway.
ICT: Your book is also not "romantic"; the Indians are not always "right." For example,
you present evidence of indigenous ecological sustainability on a grand scale, but
point out that there were also ecological disasters. Do you think it is important to know
that the Indigenous Peoples were not flawless, but were humans who could make
mistakes?
CM: Yes. Indians are human beings. Put baldly like that, it seems like a really stupid,
obvious thing to say. And I bet your readership has never had any doubt on this score!
But too much of the history Ive read has failed to take this to heart. Indians seem
constantly to be presented as plaster saints or plaster sinners. One is a nicer
stereotype than the other, but both deny that native peoples participate in the full
range of human behavior, good and bad.
A subtler version of this is what I (rather unfairly) call in the book Holmbergs
Mistake, after an anthropologist who described one group of very poor, hunting-andgathering South American Indians as a timeless remnant of the Stone Age when they
were in fact a persecuted people who had been driven into the forest by brutal
ranchers. Indians are constantly presented as timeless essences, people who have
never changed in thousands of years. But that is to say that they have no historythe
only people on Earth who dont change their surroundings or interact with others. And
they only enter history when Europeans come into the picture. In social-science jargon,

Indians are depicted as lacking agency. Agency includes both doing the right thing and
going off in a direction you later wish you hadnt. You could sum up my approach as
trying to write a history in which I made sure the Indians had agency.
ICT: How have your lecture and book tour audiences been responding to your work:
receptiveness to changed thinking or resistance to accepting the new scientific data?
CM: People have been incredibly kind to meI feel very lucky. The great majority has
been very open to these ideas. Certainly a few academics have harrumphed and taken
some potshots, but I figure that goes with the territory. On a personal level, Ive been
most gratified by the large number of high-school teachers who have told me they
want to include the material in my book in what they present to students. And a fair
number of native people have buttonholed me and said nice things, which of course
has tickled me no end.
ICT: Thank you, and best wishes.
http://people.umass.edu/derrico/mann_interview_full.html