Well, I'm reading "1491" by Charles Mann

[canoeist52]

http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X

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.

[yellerpup]

1. "1491" is an amazing book.

Read it several years ago and regularly reference it when doing research on NA studies. I am Cherokee and Mann's book is the first I've read that backs up their contention that they came "from the South."

[canoeist52]

2. This one is an updated (July 2011) second edition. Lot's of new info, I guess.

Haven't read the original.

[yellerpup]

3. I'll look into it.

Thanks!

[fishwax]

4. sounds interesting -- so does 1493

http://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307265722/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b/180-5868259-4394001

The Columbian Exchange, as researchers call it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. More important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitched along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; rats of every description—all of them rushed like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before, changing lives and landscapes across the planet.

Eight decades after Columbus, a Spaniard named Legazpi succeeded where Columbus had failed. He sailed west to establish continual trade with China, then the richest, most powerful country in the world. In Manila, a city Legazpi founded, silver from the Americas, mined by African and Indian slaves, was sold to Asians in return for silk for Europeans. It was the first time that goods and people from every corner of the globe were connected in a single worldwide exchange. Much as Columbus created a new world biologically, Legazpi and the Spanish empire he served created a new world economically.

As Charles C. Mann shows, the Columbian Exchange underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest research by ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In such encounters, he uncovers the germ of today’s fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars.

In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.

[era veteran]

7. Good to know he has a follow up with 1493.

I will put this on my Christmas want list. I want to own this book so I can loan it to my friends.
Thanks for the info.

[JDPriestly]

5. More books to add to my lengthening list of things I must read. Thanks.

[era veteran]

6. 1491 was such a good book I will have to read again.

Will look for new edition.

[ellisonz]

8. I'm prepared to accept...

A few incidents of brief contact with Hawaiians in South America (how else did the sweet potato get to Hawaii?) and with Chinese sailors along the Pacific Northwest/Alaska coast.

[Al Arafat]

9. Thank

I haven't read this ,but I want to own this book
Thanks for the info.

[Odin2005]

10. That book got me interested in the Mississippian Mound Builders.

They had stagnated since the 1300s, but they survived until De Soto's expedition caused them to be decimated by European diseases. By the 1700s only one Mississippian statelet survived, the Natchez.