1491

A deep dive into 1491 by Charles C. Mann.
In the early 1940s, the anthropologist Allan R. Holmberg lived among the Sirionó, in the Bolivian province of Beni, and in 1950 described them as one of the most destitute peoples on earth: no history, no institutions, no art, a wandering band consumed by bare survival. That account held authority until the 1980s, and a common American textbook, American History: A Survey, was still presenting the pre-Columbian Americas in 1987 as "empty of mankind and its works." Yet the Sirionó had numbered roughly three thousand before smallpox and influenza swept…