Quotes from Charles C. Mann

In the western United States, the geographer Thomas R. Vale wrote in 2002, the "modest" Indian population "modified only a tiny fraction of the total landscape for their everyday living needs." Vale is in the minority now. Spurred in part by historians like Cronon, most scientists have changed their minds about Indian fire.

Decades of conflict, including a long civil war in Mutal, led to the formation of two large blocs, one dominated by Mutal, the other by Kaan. As cities within the blocs traded attacks with each other, half a dozen cities ended up in ruins, including Naranjo, Oxwitza', Mutal, and Kaan.

The parallels between Borlaug and Vogt are inexact. Borlaug never wrote a manifesto and mostly declined the roles of theorist and exponent. Instead he became, by the example of his life, the emblem of a way of thought—the Wizard's way. His success would show, at least to Wizards, that science and technology, properly applied, could allow humankind to produce its way into a prosperous future.

all the fossil fuels humankind will ever have are already here, waiting to be extracted from the ground—in contrast to food, which is grown every season from the soil, and freshwater, which is drawn in constant but limited amounts from rivers, lakes, and aquifers.

The first recorded European epidemic of syphilis erupted in late 1494 or early 1495. In the former year, Charles VIII of France led fifty thousand vagabond mercenaries from every alley of Europe to attack Naples, which he desired to rule.

Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Slowly Dermer's crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum's entire social world had vanished.

Farmers learned to plant fallow fields with clover, which recharges the soil with nutrients.

To visitors today it seems obvious that Cahokia and the many other mound sites in the Midwest and Southeast are the remains of Indian settlements. It did not seem so clear in the past.

vest-pocket apocalypse.

When the rivers receded, they exposed a wide strip of bottomland. Into this land a group of Indians coalesced sometime before 800 A.D. Nobody knows what these people called themselves or which language they spoke. They were not "Cahokians

Charles's army disintegrated as it fled, shedding companies of venereal soldiers along the way. A more effective means for spreading syphilis over a large area is hard to imagine. Within a year cities throughout Europe were banishing people afflicted with the disease.

To the question of how to survive, his work said: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. It said: we can build a world of gleaming richness for all. And the concomitants of this world—the giant installations, the whirring machinery in the garden, the glare of artificial light in the night sky—are to be embraced, not feared.

In Mesopotamia, the wheel dates back to at least the time of Sumer. It was a basic part of life throughout Eurasia. Chariot wheels, water wheels, potter's wheels, millstone wheels—one can't imagine Europe or China without them. The only thing more mysterious than failing to invent the wheel would be inventing the wheel and then failing to use it. But that is exactly what the Indians did.

Almost all that can be known with certainty about this initial group is that it belonged to a diverse, four-thousand-year-old tradition characterized by the construction of large earthen mounds. Based around the Mississippi and its associated rivers, these societies scattered tens of thousands of mounds from southern Canada and the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. They were especially concentrated in the Ohio Valley, but nearly as many are found in the Southeast.

Imagine--here let me now address non-Indian readers--somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?

under bridges is only air.

For 167 days in 1925 two Polish researchers ate almost nothing but potatoes (mashed with butter, steamed with salt, cut with oil into potato salad). At the end they reported no weight gain, no health problems, and, improbably, "no craving for change" in their diet.

Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.

As the Yale historian Paul Sabin has written, the oil shock "seemingly confirmed the thesis of The Limits to Growth.

That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burners in Amazonia.

The earliest known examples appeared in northeastern Lousiana about 5,400 years ago, well before the advent of agriculture

Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England.

The Hopewell, too, built mounds, and like the Adena seem to have spoken an Algonkian language.

The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to Nee England. All of this was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they were based on.