1491 Critique

[selenite0]

Walter Jon William's The Rift made me curious about the Mound Builders, a North American Indian civilization around 1100 AD. So when I saw 1491 by Charles Mann I snapped it up. It covers all the pre-Columbian societies of the Americas. It's full of fascinating stuff. The overwhelming impact of European diseases made it extremely difficult to estimate the original population size. The Medieval Climate Optimum was trashing Andean cities while improving European crops. And Squanto's story is much more of an adventure than the Pilgrims'.

Unfortunately, mixed in with all these wonderful new facts were occasional references to stuff I already knew. Lots of those references were wrong.

When describing the Spanish conquest of the Incas Mann mentioned that conquistador cavalry could have been beaten by Inca spearmen. Totally true. I've got enough books describing how pre-gunpowder infantry can defeat cavalry to fill a shelf of their own. But Mann's example to prove this is the Battle of Marathon. No way. Not only was the Persian army only 2-5% cavalry but it was the absence of the cavalry that triggered the Athenian attack.

Mann also talked up the fiber technology of the Incas by pointing out that some conquistadors laid aside their steel breastplates for native cloth armor. He implies the cloth would protect better against enemy attacks. Hardly. After winning against a force dozens of times their size without losing a single man the Spaniards likely thought the Incan chipped-stone weapons were less of a danger than heatstroke, or at least a mild enough danger to let comfort overrule security.

Another error was the description of carbon-14 dating. That was very odd considering the previous paragraph described it correctly. A typo? Or cutting and pasting an explanation without understanding it? At the very least it's evidence of carelessness.

Then there was the discussion of the Norte Chico civilization. Mann presented it as a rival of Sumer, making the Andes a co-equal cradle of civilization with Mesopotamia. But in 3000 BC Sumer had cities up to 24,000 people in size, while Caral had only 3000. It's not a counterpart of Sumer but of Catal Huyuk, which had 5-10,000 people in 7500 BC.

Mann also claimed the Norte Chico cities were unfortified. Let's look at one of their structures:

If you're leading a band of spearmen on a raid on there, which option would you pick?
1. Lead them 2 by 2 up the ramp while the defenders line the edge to shoot at you.
2. Climb up the side while the defenders drop rocks on you.
3. Say "heck with it" and go raid a little peasant village.

In fairness to Mann, "unfortified" could be the mistaken assessment of the archaeologists rather than the author. I've seen the same description of Catal Huyuk, which would be murder on a storming party.

What makes the errors bother me even more is the author's statement in the afterword about fixing errors from the first edition. If this stuff got through how bad was it before? It's normal for an author to inflate the importance of his topic but inflating the facts is bad. I don't mind Mann being a booster, and this book fills a major gap. The question is whether he goes too far for his facts to be trusted.

He certainly goes pretty far in his opinions. When discussing Aztec human sacrifice he equates it to the executions of criminals in Europe. Personally I find a huge moral difference between harshly punishing convicted criminals and hunting down innocents for the sole purpose of killing them horribly. Mann mourns the loss of the Aztec philosophers. These guys wrote about their existential angst over the impending end of the world and consequent nothingness. After all, someday they'd run out of neighbors to sacrifice and the gods would pull the plug. Somehow we've managed to produce goth and emo poets without those guys to build on, so I don't feel the loss. Crushing the Aztecs was the best thing the conquistadors ever did.

Mann wraps up the book by claiming the American tradition of liberty is derived from the Iroquois. In his telling every European colonist seems to be a devoted adherent of the feudal order. The Indians they meet did as they wished, led by chiefs who carefully avoided pissing off enough of the tribe to be overthrown. This was not new to Europe--it's how the Germanic tribes who overthrew the Roman Empire lived, and how the Celts conquered by the Romans lived.

In all these cases--Iroquois, German, and Celt--the tradition of liberty only existed in a low-population density society. It didn't survive as the tribe grew larger. From the Mississippians to Charlemagne free and easy chieftainships grew into monarchies and theocracies.

The United States managed to create sustainable personal liberty by drawing on the republican traditions of Athens, Roman, and Renaissance Italy. Mann tries to hand-wave that away. I have to wonder how much other hand-waving he's doing to inflate the historical importance of the Native American societies.

I want to like this book. It's full of fascinating information about people only mentioned in passing in my other books. But I can't trust it. So it can't be part of the home-schooling library.

EDIT: See comments for the author's response.

Comments

[chaosdancer.livejournal.com]

Not that this is relevant to the rest of your post, but drop me a line if you want to come out and see the mounds! We got lots of mounds around here. :) And I can get in to all the sites free (with three of my friends) as long as I work for the historical society.

[xinef.livejournal.com]

I have a borrowed copy of this book on my TBR shelf. Will read it more skeptically now (which is good, I don't tend to be a very skeptical reader).

Have you read "Guns, Germs and Steel" and if so, what did you think of it?

[phanatic.livejournal.com]

And have you read Carnage and Culture?

Because it's fucking awesome.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Had to check the shelf--yep, that's my VDH book.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Yes, and "good until the start of the Bronze Age." More detailed discussions:

http://selenite.livejournal.com/33955.html
http://selenite.livejournal.com/41426.html

[kishiriadgr.livejournal.com]

It's not entirely true that the Aztecs "hunted down innocents" for sacrifice. The daily sun sacrifice required a warrior to be killed, and he had to be captured in battle. There were some other annual sacrifices that did require the deaths of civilians; the annual sacrifice to Tlaloc was a child sacrifice and particularly horrifying. That one was also widespread; the Mayan did it too, to a similar god they called Chac.

MY question, which is the one whose answer could make me throw the book against the wall, is that did it attribute the fall of the Aztec ONLY to the Spanish? One common misconception is that the native people of the Valley of Mexico, from Veracruz to what is now Mexico City, were all "Aztecs". They were all Nahuatl speakers, but they weren't all "Aztecs". The Aztecs were the kingdom in the Tenochtitlan area alone, and the Spanish were only able to conquer them because the other Nahua people, most notably those from the Republic of Tlaxcala, helped them do it. They were fed up with being taxed by Moctecuma. The Tlaxcalans brought with them their Otomi mercenary army, which also made a large difference. The politics of central Mexico before the Spanish arrived is a history unto itself, which most history books ignore.

In return, the Tlaxcalans were allowed to ban the Spanish from their city, were exempt from servitude, and given the privelege of being allowed to ride horses.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

A man standing in defense of his home is commiting no crime that would justify his execution. And I suspect a Ghandhi-esque non-violent response would have the young men dragged off to the temples just the same.

Your question I can give you a happy answer to. Mann's mission with the book is to describe in detail the extent to which the natives were actors rather than acted upon, so the Aztec's ("Triple Alliance" in his telling) local enemies and how their decisions drove the campaign were discussed at length.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

Have you posted this review w/ Amazon?

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Not yet, but celticdragonfly has convinced me I should.

Mound Builders

[bkseiver.livejournal.com]

I grew up in the land of mound builders, specifically near Toolsboro, IA (think near Wapello). This is on the bluff where Joliette and his men landed on the Mississippi on their exploration voyage. See the official teaching site:
http://www.state.ia.us/government/dca/shsi/sites/toolsboro/toolesboro_teacher_guide.html

[dekarch.livejournal.com]

What he's also missing is the simple fact that while North and South America produced warriors who used spears, none of those could have ever, even theoretically stood up to Spanish cavalry, or even a dozen pissed off guys on scrubby little ponies.

They lacked discipline. Iron discipline--imposed by relentless drill and a chain of command able to impose punishment to squash any disobedience--is the single unalternable requirement of quality heavy line infantry. It existed only in the West and then only at certain times and places, and was a product of that supression of individual license that this foolish author mistakes for authoritarianism. Even the Scots found that to stiffen the schiltrons against English cavalry required their nobility to dismount and form the front line, providing the leadership and incidentally the armored men necessary to absorb the initial charge.

License is not liberty, and indiscipline and license are what caused the native cultures of America to lose what liberty they had.

Phalanx or shield-wall are both valid options to stop shock cavalry in their tracks, but without unit cohesion, defined chains of command, and regular drill, you just have a mass of guys with spears.

I endorse your comments on the Aztecs without much discussion. Mourning the Aztecs is like mourning the smallpox vaccine. The Incas weren't much better, and IIRC the mound-builder cultures had rigidly stratified caste distinctions that would make the Hindus look socially mobile.

As for Norte Chico, I would be interested to know if there is any archaeological evidence one way or the other regarding the existence of a palisade on the sides of the mound. I mean, if you don't have to shield yourself from siege engines, you'd go for a lightweight screen intended to stop arrows from self-bows with low draw-weights. If the edges of the mounds had eroded, there could be no evidence one way or another.

There is, to me, a world of difference between saying, "There is no evidence of fortification," and saying "There was no fortification." The latter is harder to support than the former. I agree that elevating the buildings and providing only a narrow entrance ramp looks fundamentally defensive to me, unless someone can suggest an alternative explanation for these guys not just building on the grounds, when the mounds had to be raised by hand by folks with stone tools.

[phanatic.livejournal.com]

They lacked discipline. Iron discipline--imposed by relentless drill and a chain of command able to impose punishment to squash any disobedience--is the single unalternable requirement of quality heavy line infantry.

*You've* read Carnage & Culture then.

[dekarch.livejournal.com]

Actually, no. Who's it by? The best book on the subject that I've found was The Western Way of War by Victor Davis Hanson.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

They're both by VDH. I have one by him but can't remember which book it is . . .

[phanatic.livejournal.com]

Same guy. Basically, it's a long rebuttal to GG&S that explains "The Western Way of War and Other Things was a better way to do things than what those other guys came up with."

[stevenehrbar.livejournal.com]

The origin of American liberty is easy to explain.

1) Take the British constitution of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.
2) Expand the yeomanry (that is, the class of commoners represented in Parliament) to well over half the adult male population.
3) Have the king and the peerage be weeks out of contact and have no real interest in what's going on in the place anyway.
4) Simmer for over a hundred years.

At that point, you get the society of 1763. That society will, like any other, resist any attempt for outsiders to change its power structure -- like, for example, the king and peerage taking an interest and trying to exert their nominal authority.

If the resistance is successful, the nominal authority will be overthrown, and the new society will scramble for a new theory for their society. They won't adopt a local king or nobility, because that would be just as threatening to the local power structure. They'll look to any precedents to come up with something compatible with the society they are, and try a number of experiments, but the real key is they've been a working urbanized republic(s) for generations already.

Charles Mann replies

[(Anonymous)]

I occasionally use Technorati to see if anyone has remarked on my book and came across your interesting critique, some of which told me stuff I didn't know, some of which I think misinterpreted my book. I am on the road and don't have a copy of my book handy, so I will not be able to be as specific as I'd like. But I also have some time to spare, so here's a response.

I was intrigued by your comment about Marathon. I had read that the battle (on which I am no expert) was a paradigmatic example of cavalry against foot soldiers. If that's wrong, I'll happily correct it in the next printing and, if you'd like, give you credit. (I see that Wikipedia agrees with you, FWIW.) Thanks for the tip.

I'm not sure what error you're talking about in the C-14 dating. I made a slip in the initial description, and told the printers to correct it. It's possible that they made a mistake, or that somehow I introduced another one and didn't notice it. Can you specify? As I said, I don't have a copy of the book with me.

Re: the Inka cloth armor. Your point is exactly the one I was trying to make. Spanish armor was so unsuitable for the Andes that many Spanish soldiers laid it aside and substituted Inka armor. (IIRC, John Hemming, the leading historian of the conquest, at one point counts up the number of descriptions of this.) I wasn't saying that it would repel steel weapons, I was saying that you couldn't wear it while scrambling around the high mountains. It may be worth noting that the Spaniards switched to cloth armor even though Inka slings could throw 1/2-lb. stones in excess of 100 mph -- enough force to kill a horse (and presumably a man), as the Spaniards themselves noted.

(continued on next comment)

Re: Charles Mann replies

[selenite.livejournal.com]

A better illustration of infantry vs cavalry would be Bannockburn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bannockburn), though sapppersgt's points above still hold.

As for C-14 dating, I'm looking at page 171 [For reference, I have the 1st Vintage edition, Oct 2006, 6th printing]. The 2nd paragraph says "carbon-14 (C14), a mildly radioactive form of carbon that over time disintegrates--decays, as scientists say--back into a form of nitrogen." This is correct. The third paragraph says "every 5,730 years, half of the C14 atoms in nonliving substances become regular carbon atoms." No--they become nitrogen as said above. As I said originally, this is probably at the level of a typo, but it leapt out at me. I'm surprised that archeologists or other technically trained people reviewing the book wouldn't have caught that before.

Re: Charles Mann replies

[(Anonymous)]

Ack--thank you. This is simply an error that I made even though -- as the previous paragraph indicates -- I sort of knew what I was doing about radiocarbon. Maybe my mind was drifting into thinking about some other form of radioactive decay? Who knows. In any case, I gave Vintage a long list of small things like this to fix and they evidently didn't do this one, and I must have missed it again. Sigh. Thanks for pointing it out.
CCM

Re: Charles Mann replies

[selenite.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. I've had errors I've only found by feedback too.

Charles Mann replies (2)

[(Anonymous)]

(continued from previous comment)

I'm trying to make a different point about Norte Chico than the one you think I'm making. Uruk was indeed a lot bigger than any individual Andean city (I believe I say that), but the whole urban complex of the Norte Chico -- at least 30 small cities cheek by jowl -- was unlike anything else in the world at the time.

About the fortifications: I am as you surmise quoting two leading Norte Chico archaeologists, Haas and Creamer, who find the cities' lack of concern for strategic locations, defensive walls, etc., quite puzzling. According to Haas and Creamer, Norte Chico people didn't live on top of the mounds, didn't store food there, and didn't have any kind of walls to hide behind, so the archaeologists' belief is that they weren't very useful for defense. Maybe you're right, but I can assure you that the perceived lack of defensive capability is something that archaeologists are investigating.

I think, too, you misunderstand my comparison of the Triple Alliance to Europe. The sacrifices were abhorrent by today's standards, but so were the executions in Europe. In both cases, the deaths were torturous (beheading, drawing and quartering, etc.), accompanied by religious rituals, and performed in front of exultant crowds -- read the contemporary descriptions of the public hangings in Tyburn if you don't believe me. The executions were seen as justified because the criminals had attacked the state, which was divinely ruled by the king; executions were required to return the system to spiritual equilibrium. But this is not very different from the Triple Alliance belief that sacrifices were required to preserve celestial harmony. In addition, the "crimes" for which people were executed included witchcraft (a religious offense), inability to pay debts, sodomy, counterfeiting, burning a barn with grain in it, and other offenses -- hardly anything we'd recognize as justice. The point, again, was not to celebrate the Triple Alliance's sacrifices but to point out that in a time of auto-da-fe in Europe they were not hugely out of the norm.

Finally, I do NOT wrap up my book by claiming that "the American tradition of liberty is derived from the Iroquois." I argue that the Indians of the Northeast, both Algonkian and Iroquoian, had an important impact on the emerging American culture, and that this impact might have contibuted to what I call "the democratic spirit" of the society. The argument is simple: time after time (I give a number of examples, but could provide many more), European observers marveled at the lack of class consciousness (my words, not theirs, but that's what it was) in Northeastern Indians. So did philosophers like Locke, Rousseau and Hume, as well as later polemicists like Thomas Paine. Later, in the 19th century, we see European observers frequently describing US society in very similar terms. If you read the book carefully, you'll see I do not deny the impact of Greek and Roman models -- I nowhere say anything like that. I do argue that one part of the mix could have been the cultural (not institutional) influence of some native peoples. That they lived in low-density societies has nothing to do with their usefulness as exemplars to Europeans at the time. Nor does the fact that German tribes (who, as I explain in an appendix, weren't "tribes" in the same way as the Haudenosaunee or Wendat) also had greater individual freedom than English, French and (to a lesser extent) Dutch people -- those weren't examples that English, French or Dutch writers and travelers used in their accounts of what they saw. Before dismissing this connection, I would urge you to the sources I cite: in addition to the original documents themselves (most of which have been reprinted), cultural historians like Colin Calloway, Denis Vaugeois and Denys Delage.

In any case, thank you again for taking the time to look at the book.

Sincerely,
Charles C. Mann

Re: Charles Mann replies (2)

[selenite.livejournal.com]

An elevated position can be very useful for defense even without walls. Many battles have been decided by who managed to grab the high ground before the start. So even without walls the mounds would be a useful refuge during an attack. Archaeologists might benefit by bringing in members of the SCA or other historical reenactment groups to discuss the effects of structures from a practical viewpoint.

The point, again, was not to celebrate the Triple Alliance's sacrifices but to point out that in a time of auto-da-fe in Europe they were not hugely out of the norm.

In Europe if people had stopped committing crimes it would have been regarded as a good thing and praised by everyone not drawing their salary as enforcers. Credit fraud, counterfeiting, and arson are still crimes today. They weren't banned to provide a handy supply of execution victims but to protect the people who needed to buy their food and sleep in wood houses.

A Triple Alliance raiding party was not grabbing someone because he, individually, was a threat to the survival of the universe, but because they had created a tradition that demanded executions.

I do not see any moral equivalence between them.

Re: Charles Mann replies (2)

[(Anonymous)]

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the execution/sacrifice question. Two arguments to me seem to apply:

1) I don't see a huge amount of moral daylight between executing people for crimes that today seem trivial (e.g., sodomy) because such crimes were seen long ago as pervasive threats to spiritual and temporal authority and executing people for reasons that today seem crazy (to maintain the universe) because such reasons were seen long ago as pervasive threats to spiritual and temporal authority.

2) Many historians believe that Europeans did, in fact, gin up executions when their rulers needed them, irrespective of the individual's actions. The paradigmatic example is witchcraft. Here classic sources include Hugh Trevor-Roper's European Witch Craze and Hugh Briggs' Witches and Neighbors. I may not remember correctly, but I believe Briggs estimates that the craze killed between 40-50,000 people. And Trevor-Roper and Briggs argue that witchcraft accusations were only one of many ways in which executions for bogus "crimes" were used to preserve the larger social fabric. Many executions for crimes like infanticide were actually efforts to snuff out people seen as threatening to the cosmic order, such as Jews, magicians, and homosexuals. You can argue that Europeans didn't kill as many people for state reasons as the Triple Alliance, but -- again -- I don't see a lot of moral daylight here between them.

CCM

Re: Charles Mann replies (2)

[dekarch.livejournal.com]

You have got to be kidding me. . .

Witch hunts as trumped up by rulers to support the "larger social fabric"?

The "craze" spanned about 250 years and is only recorded as having resulted in a bit more than 12K deaths, with 40K being high-end for "reasonable" estimates. Most of these executions were actually driven by common people in Germany and Central Europe rather than their rulers--in highly centralized and nearly theocratic Spain, the majority of those accused of witchcraft were acquitted by the demonized "Spanish Inquisition" which actually required a standard of proof, rather than the semi-literate Lutheran preachers (and their counter-reformation Catholic opponents) who whipped up mob hysteria in Germany.

Compared to Aztec rituals that required multiple sacrifices associated with holy days held on a continuing basis? The Spanish recorded that to produce the needed tears for the child sacrifices (verified by skeletons of 3 and 4 year old children) to Tlaloc, they would rip the fingernails out of their victims on the way to burning them alive.

Compared to hanging an arsonist--or even a sodomist--that's pretty heinous.

Re: Charles Mann replies (2)

[mukhtar.livejournal.com]

Europeans may not have gone on raiding parties to grab random people for public execution due to any religious fervor (at least, not outside of the Inquisition), but I think there were several cases where people were publicly tried and executed due to political expediency, which would have exacted a similar level of zealotry from its citizens.

Despite them being from a different time period, look at the trial with Joan of Arc, or any of the executions after the French Revolution, or further back there were the trials at the end of the crusades with the Church discrediting the Templars. True, they were all during times of turmoil, but most of them were engineered behind the public eye in an attempt to sway public opinion more towards the view of the people running the show. These were not unprecedented in European history either.

I don't see much moral difference between the two societies in the execution of their methods of justice, the only major difference seems to be in the number and/or percentage of the population in their respective regions.

Re: Charles Mann replies (2)

[dekarch.livejournal.com]

The Templars were about money. Specifically, the money owed them by the King of France. Don't read more into it than it was.

The point is less to argue for the perfection of Western civilization, but the rebuttal of the point, inferred by Selenite, that Mr. Mann seemed to be making that the Aztecs were just as good, if not better, than those who wiped them off the planet.

I refute by asking how many of your relatives have been sacrificed to make the sun come up this year. After all, the Aztec didn't burn toddlers alive and rip the hearts out of their neighbors in times of crisis or turmoil, nor where these rituals designed to placate a restive population or convince them of the superiority of one political party over another.

They were simply accepted as a necessary sacrifice to keep the gods from destroying the world. As unremarkable as putting gas in your car. The sort of society that could evolve such institutions is a disease, and the world is a better place without it.

[perich.livejournal.com]

Credit fraud, counterfeiting, and arson are still crimes today. They weren't banned to provide a handy supply of execution victims but to protect the people who needed to buy their food and sleep in wood houses.

I'm curious: why were these crimes punished with hanging, beheading, drawing/quartering or weighting? Why those punishments and not others? What caused those specific, public, ritualized punishments to be chosen?

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I can't speak to those specifically but there's various historical examples of horrific punishments being ordered to enhance the deterrent value, ie, not because the criminal deserved it, but so potential criminals would be too afraid to start. The practical results don't seem to prove the theory.

[perich.livejournal.com]

I would also argue that the public and ritualized nature of these punishments had a deliberate social component. Like the scapegoat in ancient Jewish communities, there's a public revel in the evil being "driven out" of the social order.

I know there's not a one-to-one analogy to public sacrifices in pre-Western Central America (their victims weren't necessarily "evil"; they were just unfortunate), but I think the public spectacle and catharsis common to both aren't just coincidence.