The indigenous cultures of the Americas - Essay Example

According to the historians, Holmberg spent his time in the 1940s among the Sirono tribes and decided to call them the most culturally backward people in the entire world. He stated that these tribes had no religion, no art or design, no musical instruments, no domestic animals and no clothes, and lived in constant hunger and want. They couldn’t even make fire or count to three. Mann decided to argue against these findings with deep respect. He stated that Holmberg thought that the people before Columbus had no real history, while he did not take into account that people before Columbus were just persecuted survivors and had been totally devastated with the smallpox and influenza in the 1920s.

Mann detailed his personal experience with the pre-Columbian times history within the article that he discussed in his book, according to which he said that during his times in the high school, he learned that the Indians came over to the land of Americas over 12000 years ago across the Bering Strait, and these Indians lived in isolated and small groups and had little to no impact over the environment. As a result, the land of Americas remained wild and barren even after millennia of habitation.

In the introduction of his book, he compares his research with Holmberg’s and initially it seems as if both are two different pieces altogether. However, after reading the entire book, it becomes apparent that the investigation of anthropologists had come up to wrong conclusions. The greatest mistake according to Mann is the assumption that many historians made assuming that the Indians had no history before the arrival of Columbus on the continent. Mann looked at the history before Columbus from various points of views, and ended up making a specific kind of anthropological revolution.

According to the investigations that he made about the life of the contemporaries and the field of culture showed that the Indians took proper and