Mann provides answers to such questions and poses many more that have been raised by recent anthropological and archaeological research. In his ambitious new book, 1491, accomplished science writer Charles C. How was it that small bands of gold-hungry conquistadores could have defeated the armies of empires with populations that numbered in the millions? Was much of North America an almost empty land waiting to be developed by more advanced colonists? Almost all of the achievements of Pre-Columbian cultures and civilizations have been systematically neglected or depreciated by most Western-oriented scholars. It is a rare textbook on world history that does not begin its account of the past in the Western Hemisphere with the European invasion that took place soon after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
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