Science writer who challenges preconceptions of the Americas to deliver March 27 lecture
Charles C. Mann describes the amazing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan with running water and clean streets, as well as Mexican societies cultivating maize and American Indians shaping the world in which they lived.
All before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas.
The science journalist and best-selling author will deliver a free, public lecture at 7 p.m. March 27 in Hutchins Concert Hall at the Collins Center for the Arts at the University of Maine.
Mann’s “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Keck Award for the best book of the year. That book, as well as “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created,” have been described as groundbreaking works of science, archeology and history.
His lecture is titled “1492: The New World Columbus Created.”
Dan Sandweiss, director of the UMaine School of Policy and International Affairs, says Mann is one of the leading journalists writing about archaeology and related topics.
“His books ‘1491’ and ‘1493’ are important syntheses that called attention to how people interacted with their environment before and after the arrival of Europeans in the New World, placing people in a more nuanced and realistic ecological setting and showing how far pre-Columbian peoples had advanced,” says Sandweiss, who also is a professor of anthropology and quaternary and climate studies.
Mann, a graduate of Amherst College, is a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired and has written for Fortune, The New York Times and Smithsonian.
His books, including his most recent “The Wizard and the Prophet,” will be available for sale and autographing following the lecture.
For more information, or to request a disability accommodation, call 581.1226.