Most of us have the same hazy ideas of Indians that have been drilled into us from preschool: Small bands of hunter-gathers, living lightly on an edenic pristine wilderness. Mann ably summarizes the past fifty years of archaeological scholarship to show that this picture is wrong in every particular. Pre-contact Indians were largely agrarian, settled in cities as big as any in Europe, had a rich religious tradition that left massive monumental sites, and conducted wars and politics with hegemonic fury. They met the initial groups of European explorers as equals and more than equals, despite their lack of metal tools or domesticated animals. A century later, they were almost all dead, taken by waves of disease that may have had mortality rates of over 95%. Think of a room of 20 people. Now think of a room with 19 corpses and one survivor. The Indian of popular imagination is a post-apocalyptic survivor, living in an landscape of ecological collapse where previously marginal species like buffalo and the passenger pigeon spread like wild.

The status of the Indian is a political hot potato, since every American state rests on an initial act of massive genocide. The idea of a continent untouched by human hands is fundamental to modern environmentalism. Mann speaks clearly and deliberately to these ends. The exact arrival of Indians to the Americans is uncertain. The Clovis culture of 12000 years ago is well documented, but they may not have been the first. Indian civilizations changed the land deliberately, creating a continent wide-orchard. They also suffered their own ecological collapses, particularly the Maya and the Cahokia mound builders seem to have had political systems that fractured under environmental strains. The Amazon river basis may have supported a flourishing urban culture that succumbed to the same waves of epidemics.

Any book with ambitions as grand as a complete history of the Indian people is bound to be incomplete. Mann lavishes chapters on the uniqueness of domesticated maize, but leaves its actual domestication a mystery. Comparisons to familiar examples from European history are sometimes useful, and sometimes miss the mark. The pueblo cultures of the American southwest are unfortunately slighted, along with the Pacific Northwest. And as always, some of the most interesting cultures left behind nothing in the way of written records, either from a lack of an alphabet, or deliberate destruction by colonizers. Still, Mann has provide a precious counter to popular understanding, and a view of the cultures of 1491 as active participants in their own destiny, soon to be struck down by a fluke of biology rather than any innate flaw.