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this book is somewhat poorly written/edited but totally amazing

yeah it blew my mind, esp. the part about the passenger pigeons/bison representing a predator-less population explosion instead of abundance

i haven't gotten to that part yet! it's probably the wrong place to start, but i'd just never really read an account of the "medieval" new world and it's making lots of disparate chunks of things i only kinda knew lock into place

this book is amazing!

i mean, i had never even read an account of pizarro's conquering of the inca - traditional, revisionist, whatever. maybe the greatest military upset in history?? i R a dunce!!

totally blew my mind. i feel like i think about this book all the time. re-oriented the way i see the world. kind of feel like the americas pre-columbus are slept on general, i didn't learn shit about them growing up and it's astonishing how euro-asian centric the narrative of "civilization" is in the west. shit was going down here for about as long as in the early mesopotamian civilizations. and the scope and complexity of pre-columbian societies was just immense. i'm first-generation peruvian-american so i was aware of a lot of this but i simply wasn't taught it in high school or college. tenochtitlan was bigger than paris!

with cleaner water :)

I read this book* several years ago and quite a bit of it stuck with me. I highly recommend it. One learns dozens of interesting and eye-opening things.

*NB: It explains numerous recent archaeological theories about peoples in the western hemisphere in the centuries immediately prior to the Spanish invasion.

Just reviving this thread to mention the decent BBC series The Inca: Masters of The Clouds which is currently running. You probably need torrentz or the expat shield to watch in the USA.