## Metadata * Author: [[Charles Mann]] * ASIN: B000JMKVE4 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKVE4 ## Highlights It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past. — location: [462](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=462) ^ref-42729 --- (fearing fraud, some European governments banned the new numbers). — location: [558](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=558) ^ref-21867 --- Calakmul, — location: [623](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=623) ^ref-64633 --- agro-forestry, — location: [680](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=680) ^ref-40581 --- Hopewell culture — location: [848](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=848) ^ref-28554 --- plaza of Awkaypata, 625 feet by 550 feet, carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand carried in from the Pacific — location: [1464](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=1464) ^ref-31350 --- From the great plaza radiated four highways that demarcated the four asymmetrical sectors into which he divided the empire, Tawantinsuyu, “Land of the Four Quarters.” — location: [1469](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=1469) ^ref-37474 --- if Pizarro had not interrupted, the Inka might have created a monolithic culture as enduring as China. — location: [1509](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=1509) ^ref-58020 --- Their military was hampered by the cult of personality around its deified generals, which meant both that leaders were not easily replaced when they were killed or captured and that innovation in the lower ranks was not encouraged. — location: [1712](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=1712) ^ref-47358 --- When Columbus landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile than China or India. — location: [1865](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=1865) ^ref-5840 --- Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, — location: [1989](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=1989) ^ref-20369 --- intellectual sin of arguing from silence. — location: [2000](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=2000) ^ref-30086 --- Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone. — location: [2194](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=2194) ^ref-4345 --- ambition succeeds best when disguised by virtue, — location: [2318](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=2318) ^ref-2875 --- coruscating — location: [2370](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=2370) ^ref-1958 --- Neither European nor Indian had a secular understanding of disease. — location: [2546](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=2546) ^ref-45597 --- In 1997 an archaeologist and a medical doctor with archaeological leanings identified them as human fetuses. Their features were portrayed accurately enough to identify their stage of development. Researchers had not recognized them because artistic renditions of fetuses are almost unheard of in European cultures (the first known drawing of one is by Leonardo). — location: [4016](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4016) ^ref-1776 --- The Olmec, he thought, were the Romans of Mesoamerica, a magisterial society that “established the pattern which, through the centuries, was to be followed by other expansionist Mesoamerican cultures.” — location: [4050](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4050) ^ref-48453 --- wheel-blindness. — location: [4269](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4269) ^ref-52280 --- buried in the soil, a crop of potatoes could not be easily seized.) — location: [4336](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4336) ^ref-46583 --- The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s will; “great beast,” in which the rulers’ power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and “great fraud,” in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority. Every state is a mix of all of these — location: [4378](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4378) ^ref-11535 --- Seven decades later, when Pizarro held his victory celebration in Qosqo, it was equal in grandeur to any city in Europe. — location: [4523](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4523) ^ref-13098 --- emotional realm — location: [4543](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4543) ^ref-52734 --- John Smith claimed to have ridden through the Virginia forest at a gallop. — location: [4748](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4748) ^ref-49996 --- Most of Indiana and part of Illinois, for instance, was prairie or “barrens” when it was first surveyed in 1818–20; a 2009 study of surviving trees from the pre-European era showed that even in thickly forested areas fires intense enough to scar trunks occurred, on average, every 2.82 years. — location: [4758](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4758) ^ref-2693 --- Adena tobacco, a different species from the tobacco in cigarettes today, contains several hallucinogens and five to ten times as much nicotine—enough, all told, to make it psychoactive. — location: [4859](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4859) ^ref-10726 --- The Hopewell apparently sought spiritual ecstasy by putting themselves into trances, perhaps aided by tobacco. — location: [4882](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=4882) ^ref-44808 --- Years ago a friend and I were served hickory milk in rural Georgia by an eccentric backwoods artist named St. EOM who claimed Creek descent. — location: [5004](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=5004) ^ref-50948 --- Piecing together events from these sources is like trying to understand the U.S. Civil War from the plaques on park statues: possible, but tricky. — location: [5091](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=5091) ^ref-32566 --- “But that’s the old archaeological canard—if you can’t figure out the function of something, you say it was for ritual.” — location: [5721](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=5721) ^ref-55421 --- None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one of the seven chose the Indians. — location: [6368](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000JMKVE4&location=6368) ^ref-32422 ---