1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

  89 “crater”: Interview, Wilson; Wilson 1999.

  4 / Frequently Asked Questions

  1 De Soto: Duncan 1995; Mena 1930:264–66 (Challcochima). De Soto, Hemming observed, was “as brutal as any other conquistador. He [led] the force that raped the mamaconas [nuns, more or less] of Cajas during the march toward Cajamarca. His reputation among some modern writers of being more humane than his companions is undeserved” (Hemming 2004:555).

  2 De Soto expedition: The numbers of men and animals differ somewhat in different accounts. I use Ramenofsky 1987:59. The basic sources are Garcilaso de la Vega, 1951, “Gentleman of Elvas” 1922, and its apparent predecessor, Fernández de Biedma 1922. Other documents are collected in Clayton, Knight, and Moore eds. 1993. The state of scholarly knowledge is assayed in Galloway ed. 1997. Popular accounts include Wilson 1999:134–37; Morgan 1993:72–75; Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):28–31.

  3 Hudson’s reconstruction of route: Interview, Hudson; Hudson 1993. For a fierce debate on the reliability of these reconstructions, see Henige 1993; Hudson, DePratter, and Smith 1993; Hudson et al. 1994.

  4 De Soto’s passage over Mississippi: “Gentleman of Elvas” 1922 (vol. 1):112–17 (all quotes, 113); Fernández de Biedma 1922 (vol. 2):25–28. See also Rollings 1995:39–40.

  5 La Salle expedition: Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):920–30.

  6 Contrast between De Soto and La Salle’s experiences: Author’s interviews, Galloway, Hudson, Ramenofsky; Ramenofsky 1987:55–63; Burnett and Murray 1993:228.

  7 Pigs as source for epidemic: Ramenofsky and Galloway 1997:271–73; Crosby 1986:172–76, 212–13 (suggesting epidemic disease may also have come before De Soto), 273; Crosby 2003b:77 (importance of pigs to Spanish).

  8 Indian lack of domesticated animals, lactose intolerance: Crosby 1986:19, 27; Ridley 2000:192–94. Francisco Guerra notes that the Philippines did not experience epidemics from colonization, though its inhabitants were as isolated as Indians. The critical difference, he suggests, was the existence of domesticated animals, especially pigs, in the Philippines (Guerra 1988:323).

  9 Caddo and Coosa: Perttula 1993, 1991:512–14; M. T. Smith 1994:264–65; M. T. Smith 1987.

  10 Mass graves in the Southeast: M. T. Smith 1987:60–68.

  11 1918 flu epidemic: Crosby 2003a.

  12 Plague origin, losses: Epidemiologists increasingly question whether the Black Death was bubonic plague. Rats and fleas carry bubonic plague, but the Black Death spread faster—and over colder land—than these animals usually travel. And Y. pestis has never been shown to be as contagious as the Black Death. The epidemic may instead have been of a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola (Scott and Duncan 2001). I am grateful to David Henige for drawing this discussion to my attention. For losses, see, e.g., Wrigley 1969:63.

  13 Population nadir: Ubelaker 1992:169–76, table 3. The 1890 U.S. census listed the Native American population as 237,000 (United States Bureau of the Census 1937:3, table 2). But it is widely believed that the Census Bureau undercounted, both because it did not accurately survey many native areas and because its definition of “Indian” was too restrictive. Most demographers double the reported number.

  14 Zambardino critique: Zambardino 1980 (“the errors multiply,” 8; “meaningful,” 18).

  15 “no better than”: Crosby 1992:175.

  16 Skepticism: Interviews, Ubelaker, Snow; Snow 1995 (“no support,” 1604); 1992; Snow and Lanphear 1988. I believe David Henige coined “Low Counter” and “High Counter.”

  17 Historians’ reluctance: Calloway 2003:415–16 (“boggle,” 415); McNeill 1998:19–23.

  18 1967 measles epidemic: Interviews, Napoleon Chagnon, Thomas Headland, Francis Black, Patrick Tierney; Neel et al. 1970; Neel 1977:155–68. The epidemic became the subject of controversy when U.S. journalist Patrick Tierney accused Neel and his anthropologist coauthor, Chagnon, of exacerbating and perhaps even causing it in the course of an unethical experiment on the effects of vaccination (Tierney 2000). After a furor, researchers generally agreed that the likelihood that Neel and Chagnon had spread measles was negligible (Mann 2000a, 2001; Neel et al. 2001); as the main text indicates, the epidemic apparently originated with the Tootobi missionaries (Headland 2000). The Yanomamo are also known as Yanomami, Yanoama, and Yanomamö, the different terms coming from different dialects.

  19 Distribution of blood types: Crosby 2003b:22–30. For a more complete explanation, see Crawford 1998:95–101.

  20 Relative lack of genetic disease: Author’s interviews, Black, Crosby, Dobyns (cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea); Black 2004:155 (asthma and autoimmune diseases); Hurtado, Hurtado, and Hill 2004:185 (diabetes). Dobyns stressed that the evidence is weak. Because Europeans recorded “things like the lack of beggars and madmen in city streets,” he told me, “you can assemble a sketchy picture” of societies with little genetic disease. “But as Henige would say,” Dobyns remarked of his fiercest critic, “it’s an argument from silence.”

  21 Black and HLA types: Author’s interviews, Black, Stephen S. Hall; Black 1992, 1994, 2004; Crawford 1998:131–34. HLA classes are succinctly explained in Hall 1997:368–69. My thanks to Steve Hall for walking me through this material.

  22 “Europeans’ capacity”: Jennings 1975:22.

  23 Russian fur trade: Standard histories include Fisher 1943; Lincoln 1994.

  24 1768–69 epidemic: Bril 1988:238 (“No one knows”); Samwell 1967:1252–59 (“Ruins,” 1252); Sauer 1802:306–08. Sauer’s death tally of 5,368 is identical to that of the writer William Coxe (Coxe 1780:5) and reasonably congruent with the estimate that “three fourths” of the populace died by French consul Jean Baptiste Barthelemy Lesseps, who was traveling in Kamchatka at the time (Lesseps 1790:128–29 [“three fourths,” 128]). I am grateful to Elizabeth Fenn for providing me with her notes on these references, from which I have taken the material from Lessep and Sauer.

  25 “As soon as”: Füch 1988:169–70. Again I thank Prof. Fenn.

  26 Helper-T cell hypothesis: Hurtado, Hurtado and Hill 2004.

  27 Revolutionary War epidemic: Interviews, Fenn; Fenn 2001 (start of Boston epidemic, 46; ten to thirty a day, 47; one day before the Declaration, 53–54; “Ethiopian regiment,” 57–61; Quebec, 62–71; Adams, 79).

  28 Mexico City epidemic: Calloway 2003:417–19 (“It seems likely,” 561); Fenn 2001:138–40 (Fenn suggests that a third epidemic, which moved west from New Orleans, may have “collided” with the Mexico City epidemic in the Southwest).

  29 Hopi-Nermernuh-Shoshone-Blackfoot connection: Thompson 1916:318–25, 336–38 (“with our sharp,” 336–37); Calloway 2003:419–21 (Sioux, 421); Fenn 2001:211–22. See also, Ewers 1973. “Blackfoot” usually refers to groups in Canada; “Blackfeet,” to those in the United States.

  30 “winter counts”: Sundstrom 1997; Calloway 2003:424. In Sundstrom’s survey of winter counts, all but one of the fifteen that cover 1780–82 characterized at least one of the years with the symbol for an epidemic, though some called it measles instead of smallpox (many groups initially did not distinguish them). Plains Indians defined a year as the period between the first snowfall of one winter and the first snowfall of the next, so it was not the same as a European year.

  31 Pox in Northwest: Calloway 2003:421–23; Fenn 2001:224–32 (“great preponderance,” 227), 250–58; Harris 1994; Boyd 1999:esp. 21–39.

  32 Vancouver expedition: Vancouver 1984 (vol. 2):516–40 and passim (“promiscuously scattered,” 516); Puget 1939:198 (“pitted”).

  33 Quarantine: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):86–87; Salisbury 1982:106 (“could only”); Cronon 1983:88.

  34 Wider impact of epidemics: Crosby 1992; Calloway 2003:419–26; Stannard 1991:532–33; Thornton 1987; Hopkins 1994:48 (“my people”); Salisbury 1982: 105–06.

  35 Death of Hawaiian king and queen: Kuykendall 1947:76–81.

  36 Montreal peace negotiations: Havard 2001:49, 65 (Haudenosaunee losses), 130–02 (epidemic and Kondiaronk’s death).

  37 Former captives: Haudenosaun
ee Brandão 1997:72–81.

  38 Fates of Cree, Shoshone, Omaha: Calloway 2003:422–26 (“The country,” 422). See also, Campbell 2003.

  39 1524 meeting: Sahagún 1980; Klor de Alva 1990. See also, Motolinía 1950:37–38, 174–86 (de Valencia’s life).

  40 “bishops and pampered prelates”: Prescott 2000:637.

  41 Franciscan-Mexica debate: Sahagún 1980:lines 109, 115, 117, 217–18, 223–29, 235–37, 759–63, 1054 (“gods were not powerful,” 54 [summary]). See also, León-Portilla 1963:62–70.

  42 Teotihuacan and its influence: Often-cited works include Cowgill 1997; Carrasco, Jones, and Sessions eds. 2000; Berlo ed. 1993. 132 Mexica arrival date: Smith 1984.

  43 Tezozómoc’s account: Quoted in Sullivan and Knab eds., trans. 1994:98–100.

  44 Tlacaelel: Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin 1997 (vol. 1):41–53, 135–45; (vol. 2):33–37, 89, 109; León-Portilla 1992a:xxxvii–xli (“It is not fitting,” xxxviii); 1963:158–66. As Chimalpahin put it, Tlacaelel “was the instigator, the originator, through wars [of the system] by which he made the great city of México Tenochtitlan eminent and exalted” (35; trans. slightly altered for readability).

  45 “In this Sun”: Anon. 1994:66. Experts dispute the verse structure in all these poems.

  46 “tortillas”: Durán 1994:231.

  47 “moral combat”: León-Portilla 1963:216.

  48 Cortés on sacrifice: Cortés 1986:35–36 (both quotes). See also, Durán 1994:406 (excitedly, raising the toll to “2,000, 3,000, 5,000, or 8,000 men” a day on special occasions).

  49 Denial of sacrifice: Hassler 1992; Moctezuma and Solis Olguín 2003 (indigenous images of sacrifice). The anthropologist Michael Harner argued (1977) that the human sacrifice and cannibalism of the Mexica were “natural and rational,” “the only possible solution” (both 132) to supply protein to a dense population with no domesticated animals. But the Mexica lived on a lake with abundant fish and aquatic life and also obliged conquered peoples to ship them food (Ortiz de Montellano 1978). See also, Graulich 2000.

  50 European executions: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 2):516–18 (Tyburn, “the corpses,” 518); Pepys 1970 (vol. 5):21 Jan 1664 (“at least”).

  51 English executions, population: Gatrell 1994:6–15; Wrigley 1983:121. 137 Nahuatl corpus: Frances Karttunen, pers. comm.

  52 Tlamatinime: León-Portilla 1963:9–24, 62–81, 136 (quotes, 12–13).

  53 Nezahualcóyotl poems on mortality: Peñafield 1904, quoted in Sullivan and Knab eds. 1994:163 (“Truly”—I slightly altered the first line to scan better); León-Portilla 1963:6 (“Do flowers”); 1992:81 (“Like a painting”); Nabokov 1989:19 (“brief crack”).

  54 Nahuatl rhetoric: Author’s interviews, Karttunen; Garibay 1970:115.

  55 Art and truth: León-Portilla 1963:71–79 (“nothing is ‘true,’ ” 73; “He goes,” 75; “From whence,” 77).

  56 Northwest Coast art: Jonaitis 1991: chaps. 1, 8.

  57 Spanish reactions to Tenochtitlán: Díaz de Castillo 1975:214–19; Cortés 1986:102–12 (“can there,” 108–09; “obliterate,” 88).

  58 Conquest of alliance and disease’s role: Thomas 1995. Crosby (1986:200) calls Cortés’s victory “a triumph of the [smallpox] virus.”

  59 Postconquest population decline: Borah 1976; Borah and Cook 1964; Cook and Borah 1963 (25.2 million, 88); Borah 1951; Cook and Simpson 1948. For postconquest epidemics in Mexico and New Spain, see the thorough discussions in Prem 1992; N. D. Cook and Lovell 1992; the other articles in N. D. Cook and Lovell eds. 1992; Malvido 1973. Cook and Borah’s estimate was a best guess; more confidently, they argued that the precontact population was between eighteen and thirty million.

  60 “We, Christians”: Cieza de León 1959:62.

  61 Holocaust and moral capital: Examples include Thornton 1987; Stannard 1992; Churchill 1997. To be clear: Many of the books and articles that employ the term “holocaust,” such as Russell Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival (1987), are careful works of scholarship. But their authors wish also to make a political point, one that in their view flows directly from their research. Sensitive to language, they have selected a charged term to convey that point. For discussions of the moral capital that is the reward of mass victimhood, see Stannard 2001; Alexander 1994:esp. 195.

  62 “Very probably”: Katz 1994 (vol. 1):20 (emphasis in original).

  63 “economic depression”: Borah 1951:27. 148 Holmes: Quoted in Stannard 1992:244.

  64 Inadvertent subjugation: I made this argument myself in Chap. 2.

  65 Siege of Kaffa: O’Connell 1989:171.

  66 “And what was”: Churchill 2003:53. After Churchill made incendiary remarks about the World Trade Center bombing, he was fired from his academic post in 2007 for misrepresentation and plagiarism. I am quoting an argument, not a claim of fact, so his alleged academic malfeasance is irrelevant here.

  67 “the Spaniards are”: Klor de Alva 1992:xx–xxi.

  68 Díaz de Castillo: This line is not in any recent English translation, all of which

  69 are abridged; it is the last sentence of chapter 174 in the Spanish original. 149 Argument in Spanish court: Detailed in Pagden 1990: Chap. 1.

  70 Spanish view of sickness: Porter 1998; interviews, Crease, Denevan, Lovell.

  71 Salomon: Salomon 1993.

  72 Las Casas: Las Casas 1992b:28 (“beehive”), 31 (“twelve million”). See also, Motolinía 1950:38–40.

  73 Colonial accounts came to seem exaggerated: “Modern students commonly have been inclined to discount early opinions of native numbers, but rarely specified their reasons for doing so” (Sauer 1935:1). Responding to Sauer, the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber simply said, without further explanation, “I am likely to reject most [sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents] outright” (Kroeber 1939:180). See also, Cook and Borah 1971 (vol. 1):376–410 (“Sixteenth-century,” 380).

  74 Numbers creep down: Jennings 1975:16–20.

  75 Forty or fifty million: Spinden 1928:660 (50 to 75 million “souls” lost); Rivet, Stresser-Pean, and Loukotka 1952 (40 to 45 million).

  76 “Most of the arrows,” Henige’s estimate: Author’s interviews, Denevan, Henige, 1998:210 (“perhaps 40 million”).

  77 “a very high population”: Zambardino 1978. Henige responded in Henige 1978a.

  5 / Pleistocene Wars

  1 Discovery of Lagoa Santa skeletons: Calogeras 1933 (reproducing Lund’s initial letters of discovery); Mattos 1939. Lund and his successors did not well document their initial location (Soto-Heim 1994:81–82; Hrdlička et al. 1912:179–84).

  2 Fifteen thousand years: Laming-Emperaire 1979. Other researchers got even older dates, e.g., Prous 1986. Other very early Brazilian dates include Beltrão et al. 1986.

  3 Morphology of skulls: Neves, Meyer, and Pucciarelli 1996; Soto-Heim 1994:86–103; Neves and Pucciarelli 1991; Beattie and Bryan 1984; Mattos 1946.

  4 North American scoffing: One example: “These claims [of great antiquity] have long been shown to be erroneous, although the proponents of early glacial humans in the area remain vociferous” (Bruhns 1994:62). No citation for the refutation is provided.

  5 Botocudos history: Wright and Carneiro de Cunha 2000; Paraíso 1999 (botoques, 423–24); Paraíso 1992:esp. 240–43 (“just war,” 241).

  6 Botocudos’ purported similarity to Lagoa Santa Man: Interview, Pena; Soto-Heim 1994:84.

  7 Two genomes: I borrow the phrase from Margulis and Sagan 2001. Margulis pioneered the contemporary theory of the origin of mitochondria.

  8 Human genome project: Genome International Sequencing Consortium 2001; Venter et al. 2001. The announcement was in June 2000; publication followed seven months later. These genome maps were preliminary; biologists put together a 99.9 percent complete picture only in 2003.

  9 Mitochondrial genome project: Anderson et al. 1981.

  10 Mitochondria in sperm: Gyllensten et al. 1991.

  11 History of mtDNA research: Richards and Macaulay 2001.

  12 Fou
r haplogroups: Schurr et al. 1990; Horai et al. 1993; Torroni and Wallace 1995; Bandelt 2003. In 1998 scientists reported a fifth, very rare haplogroup. Also found in Europe, it may be a legacy of Genghis Khan’s incursion (Brown et al. 1998).

  13 Disdain for amateurs: As far back as 1893, William J. McGee reported with satisfaction that the Anthropological Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was refreshingly free “of those pseudoscientific communications which tend to cluster about every branch of science in its formative period … anthropology is rapidly taking form as an organized body of knowledge no less definite than the older sciences” (McGee 1900:768).

  14 Pena finds Botocudo DNA: Gonçalves et al. 2010 (“the literature,” 1). As the anthropological geneticist Michael Crawford points out, it is difficult to rule out chance in such findings—the unusual genetic signature could well be a coincidence, indicating nothing more than a single chance mutation that happened to be passed around, rather than an entire migration (pers. comm.).

  15 Taino Letter: Columbus, C., to Santangel, L.D., 14 Mar. 1493, trans. A. B. Hart and E. Channing, in Eliot ed. 1909–14, online at http://www.bartleby.com/43/2.html.

  16 Test of divinity: Benzoni 1857:77.

  17 Motecuhzoma and Spanish “gods”: Restall 2003:108–20. For an example of the story, see Prescott 2000:171–73; Tuchman 1984:11–14 (“wooden,” 14). 161 Northeast and supernatural powers: Trigger 1991.

  18 Choctaw and Zuni origins: Cushman 1999:199; Bunzel 1932.

  19 “mountains of Ararat”: Genesis 8:4 (King James version). 162 Christian befuddlement: Hallowell 1960.