1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“History is written by the winners.”

This is a really fascinating book. The basic theme is that pre-Columbian natives in the Americas were both more numerous and more culturally developed AND had a greater impact on their ecosystem than we're usually taught in school.

Sadly, we don't have a very robust set of artifacts from native tribes to provide us with the opportunity to study these cultures in greater depth. For that reason, I suspect that the the evidence for a lot of the things discussed is lighter than the author really lets us know, but he does for a great job of making a persuasive argument for these views.