Quotes from Charles C. Mann

Maize in the milpa, the Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe wrote, "is the key Ã¢â'¬Â¦ to the understanding of Mesoamerican civilization. Where it flourished, so did high culture.

Holmberg's Mistake.

The chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not include known kings, and some include kings who probably were mythological—as if a tally of English rulers matter-of-factly included King Arthur and his father, Uther Pendragon. The

Walled off from wet air by both the Andes and the Humboldt Current, the Peruvian littoral is astonishingly dry: the average annual precipitation is about two inches. The Atacama Desert, just south of Peru on the Chilean shore, is the driest place on earth—in some places rain has literally never been recorded

Like most Maya rulers, Chak Tok Ich'aak spent a lot of his time luxuriating in his court while dwarf servants attended to his whims and musicians played conch shells and wooden trumpets in the background. But

Inka satrapies;

The discovery—an unknown city in Peru that was as old as the Egyptian Pyramids—set off headlines around the world.

Our visit to Calakmul did nothing to suggest that Folan's advice was wrong. Trees enveloped the great buildings, their roots slowly ripping apart the soft limestone walls. Peter photographed a monument with roots coiled around it, boa constrictor style, five or six feet high. So overwhelming was the tropical forest that I thought Calakmul's history would remain forever unknown.

As a result, Jamestown and the other Virginia forays survived on Indian charity

Blinded by the shine from Potosí silver, the Spaniards paid little attention to conquered peoples' excremental practices.

Much of Wayna Qhapaq's time was devoted to organizing the empire's public works projects. Often these were more political than practical. Because the Inka believed that idleness fomented rebellion, the Spanish traveler Pedro Cieza de León reported, he ordered unemployed work brigades "to move a mountain from one spot to another" for no practical purpose

The natural world is incomplete without the human touch.

By mining the forests upstream for firewood and floating the logs downriver to the city, they were removing ground cover and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic floods. When these came, as they later did, kings who gained their legitimacy from their claims to control the weather would face angry questioning from their subjects.

Liking the courtly magnificence of Chan Chan, they hauled away what they could and, more important, forced the city's gold, silver, and gem workers to accompany them to Qosqo. They were instructed to transform the city into a new Chan Chan, only more impressive. Seven decades later, when Pizarro held his victory celebration in Qosqo, it was equal in grandeur to any city in Europe.

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. "Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the Kind of the Punkapaug and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father's House Ã¢â'¬Â¦," he wrote nostalgically.

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. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle

Most of all, the clash between Vogtians and Borlaugians is heated because it is less about facts than about values. Although the two men rarely acknowledged it, their arguments were founded on implicit moral and spiritual visions: concepts of the world and humankind's place in it.

The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón's voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor! Here

Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion-that the indigenous peoples of the Americas floated changelessly through the millenia until 1492-may seem ludicrous. But flaws in perspective often appear obvious only after they are pointed out. In this case they took decades to rectify.

Although the archaeological record is suggestive, it is also frustratingly incomplete; soon after the Spaniards visited, mass graves became more common in the Southeast, but there is yet no solid proof that a single Indian in them died of a pig-transmitted disease. Asserting that De Soto's visit caused the subsequent collapse of the Caddo and Coosa may be only the old logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The twenty-five cities were not sited strategically and did not have defensive walls; no evidence of warfare, such as burned buildings or mutilated corpses, has been found. Instead, he said, the basis of the rulers' power was the collective economic and spiritual good.

Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to "the good hand of God," which "favored our beginnings" by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives Ã¢â'¬Â¦ that he might make room for us." Indeed, more than fifty of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease.

In what may have been the first large-scale compulsory education program in history, every male citizen of the Triple Alliance, no matter what his social class, had to attend one sort of school or another until the age of sixteen.