1491: Introduction

The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm.

Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that in recent years has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus.

Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial.

To begin with, some researchers — many but not all from an older generation — deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness.

Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature?

So catastrophic was the decline that the Sirionó passed through a genetic bottleneck. (A genetic bottleneck occurs when a population becomes so small that individuals are forced to mate with relatives, which can produce deleterious hereditary effects.)

The Noble Savage dates back as far as the first full-blown ethnography of American indigenous peoples, Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Apologética Historia Sumaria, written mainly in the 1530s.

Yet though Indians here were playing a heroic role, the advertisement still embodied Holmberg's Mistake, for it implicitly depicted Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original wild state.

Las Casas's anti-Spanish views met with such harsh attacks that he instructed his executors to publish the Apologética Historia forty years after his death (he died in 1566). In fact, the book did not appear in complete form until 1909. As the delay suggests, polemics for the Noble Savage tended to meet with little sympathy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Four decades later, Samuel Eliot Morison, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, closed his two-volume European Discovery of America with the succinct claim that Indians had created no lasting monuments or institutions.

No consensus has emerged, but a growing number of researchers believe that the New World was occupied by a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait, got stuck on the Alaska side, and trickled to the rest of the Americas in several separate groups, very possibly in boats along the Pacific coast.

Indians had expanded their Neolithic revolutions to create a panoply of diverse civilizations across the hemisphere.

A thousand years later the village had grown to become the center of a large polity, also known as Tiwanaku.

A collection of about five dozen kingdoms and city-states in a network of alliances and feuds as convoluted as those of seventeenth-century Germany, the Maya realm was home to one of the world's most intellectually sophisticated cultures.

Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation.