Parallel Universe: The Americas Before Columbus

SPEAKER 1: What were the Americas like in 1491 before Columbus landed? Our founding myth suggests the hemisphere was sparsely-populated, mostly by nomadic tribes living lightly on the land and that the land was, for the most part, a vast wilderness. That's what most of us learned in school, along with a few paragraphs about more highly-developed cultures in Central and South America.

Research of the past few decades suggests, though, that the Americas were home to more people than Europe when Columbus landed and that most lived in complex highly-organized societies. In his new book titled 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann compiled evidence of the sophistication of pre-Columbian America. He joins us now from the studios of WFCR in Amherst, Massachusetts. Welcome to the program.

CHARLES C. MANN: Glad to be here.

SPEAKER 1: Let's just quickly paint a picture of what the new evidence suggests that America looked like in 1491, what the Indian cultures here looked like. And let's start at a very familiar place for North Americans, and that is in New England, in the area of the Plymouth Colony. What kind of Indian society was there at the time?

CHARLES C. MANN: From southern Maine down to about the Carolina's, you would have seen pretty much the entire coastline lined with farms, cleared land, interior for many miles, and densely-populated villages generally rounded with wooden walls. And then in the southeast, you would have seen these priestly chiefdoms, which were centered on these large mounds-- thousands and thousands of them, which still exist. And then as you went further down, you would have come across what is often called the "Aztec empire"-- and maybe better known as the "Triple Alliance" because it was a group of three people, which was a very aggressive, expansionistic empire that had one of the world's largest cities as its capital-- Tenochtitlan-- which is now Mexico City.

SPEAKER 1: Bigger than either London or Paris.

CHARLES C. MANN: Oh, yeah. It was a fantastic place. The Spaniards who first saw it just couldn't believe their eyes. It was in the middle of an immense lake called "Lake Texcoco" with this huge artificially-constructed set of islands there surrounded by boats. So it's kind of like Venice.

SPEAKER 1: And if you went further down into South America on the Pacific coast, you would run into the Inca Empire.

CHARLES C. MANN: Yes. Which was probably the largest state then on earth. If it was in Europe, it would have stretched from Stockholm to Cairo and covered every imaginable ecosystem. And then if you went further into the Amazon, there are dozens and dozens of chiefdoms culminating in a fairly large state on this gigantic island at the mouth of the Amazon called Marajo.

SPEAKER 1: And the new research over the past few decades also suggests that North America was as populated as Europe.

CHARLES C. MANN: Yeah. Because the Indians were wiped out to an extraordinary degree by disease, these diseases went ahead of the settlers. And so European colonists would come in, and they would find essentially recently-deserted land. And so their whole impression was of a sparsely-populated area. And it's only been in the last few decades-- thanks to more advanced archaeological and scientific tools-- we've been able to realize exactly how many people were there before the Europeans arrived.

SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. And in fact, if we go back up to North America and to the New England area, for instance, in the first 100 years or so after Europeans began coming to America, they really couldn't establish colonies because the area was so populated.

CHARLES C. MANN: And the Indians-- rather naturally-- didn't really want these people setting up permanent camps. And so you read the early chronicles, and people will make short visits and trade and the Indians will be very hospitable. And then after a certain amount of time, large force of armed men will show up and inform the Europeans of the limited duration of Indian hospitality and the Europeans would shove off. And this happened again and again and again.

SPEAKER 1: And what changed was disease?

CHARLES C. MANN: Yes.

SPEAKER 1: And so when the pilgrims showed up, they found a devastated area-- or at least an empty area.

CHARLES C. MANN: It was an emptied area, if that makes any sense. It was a "widowed land" as one historian has called it. In fact, the first 50 settlements in New England were on deserted Indian villages, and they were deserted because all the people in the them had died. And again, if you read the colonial accounts, they're constantly finding skeletons scattered all over the place and they landed in a cemetery.

SPEAKER 1: And of course, the sort of myth before all of this was that the Indians succumbed to the Europeans because of superior European technology, superior European political organization, maybe even superior moral character. But this whole theory of disease suggests that the none of those characteristics were required as important. And in fact, you suggest that, technologically, many of the Indian cultures were just as advanced-- though not in the same areas-- as the European culture.

CHARLES C. MANN: Yeah. Take the conquest of the Inca empire, which Pizarro did with just a couple hundred people. 168 I think is the exact number. And usually, that's laid to the possession of the horse and steel weaponry.

But in fact, the Inca rapidly learned how to fight the horses. And as far as the steel goes, the armor was actually impediment. The Spaniards threw it off because the Inca armor, which was made out of this densely-woven cotton, was so far superior in those conditions that these things didn't matter. What really did matter was the appalling political shape that the empire was in from civil war and also that Pizarro was an extraordinary leader and he was extremely adept at playing one faction off against the other. And this kind of thing, the traditional way that people lose from better generalship is what mattered-- not the technology so much.

SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. Let's talk a little bit more about the technology and the technological difference. One point that you make is that European technology was sort of based on compression, compression of metal, and that sort of thing while the Indian technology was-- and particularly, in South America-- focused on tension and the use of fibers.

CHARLES C. MANN: Yeah. And a perfect example of that is these bridges that the Indians had, which were suspension bridges that would go over canyons and so forth. Suspension bridges at the time didn't exist in Europe.

And the Spaniards, at first, refused to cross these bridges because they couldn't see what was holding them up. There was nothing underneath them. And there's all these letters where they say, "They have these incredible bridges. And guess what? You can actually walk across them." Again, it's just a matter of a different kind of technology.

The Inca had a very, very sophisticated metallurgy. But for their purposes, metals were most important as a means of display for their color, and so they had all these techniques for creating these very thin alloys that could be used to coat stuff. They were able to work with types of metals that the Europeans didn't understand yet. They didn't have steel tools, and the reason was that metal wasn't valued in that way. They valued it for its flexibility, for its plasticity, rather than its hardness.

SPEAKER 1: Let's talk a little bit about the predecessors to the Incas. One of the things that we understand because of research of the past couple of decades is that the Incas weren't the first highly-developed culture in that area. There were several predecessor cultures, and that's part of what has been the most interesting work in this new research over the last few years.

CHARLES C. MANN: Oh, yeah. If, in 2500 or 3000 BC, you were a martian and you had wanted to land in the most sophisticated cultures on earth, you had a very limited number of choices. And one of them would have been the coast of Peru where there was a group of cities-- 20 or 30 small cities-- probably the biggest urban complex on earth at that point.

And this was very much at the time of Sumeria and Egypt, and this has just been discovered-- the age of the cities was first established in 2001. And last year was the first publication of the survey. And essentially, wherever scientists have looked in the Americas, they've seen more evidence of more people doing more things at a higher level of complexity at a much earlier time than they had believed.

SPEAKER 1: Charles C. Mann is the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Thanks very much for joining us.

CHARLES C. MANN: It was my pleasure.