1491 by Charles C Mann?

Question

I have to write an article review on this and I'm not really even sure where to begin..we have to do a critical summary analyzing what he wrote. I cant seem to figure out the themes and how to begin to write it without like...completely summarizing the story and then analyzing what he wrote..so if anyone could help me..that would be great

Answer 1

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas. The book argues that there is evidence accumulated over the last several decades suggesting that human populations in the Western Hemisphere - that is, the indigenous peoples of the Americas - were larger in number, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than had been previously thought.

A groundbreaking 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. Among them:

In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.

Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city.

Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.

The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.



Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as "man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering."



Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it–a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.

Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively "landscaped" by human beings.



Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.

Answer 2

"Mann asserts that the general trend among scientists is to acknowledge that

   1. (a) the population levels were probably higher than traditionally believed among scientists and closer to the number estimated by "high counters"; (b) humans probably arrived in the Americas earlier than thought over the course of multiple waves of migration to the New World (not solely by the Bering land bridge over a relatively short period of time);

   2. The level of cultural advancement and settlement range was higher and broader than previously imagined; and

   3. The New World was largely not a wilderness but an environment controlled by humans (mostly with fire)."

--from Wikipedia.com

That's it in a nutshell.  See the full article at Wikipedia.....