Charles Mann Delivers a Smackdown

Just wanted to note a nice scholarly smackdown by local author & science journalist Charles Mann over at MediaIndigena.

In this guest post, author Charles C. Mann responds to Frances Widdowson’s criticism of his book,1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Widdowson delivered her critique as part of a rebuttal to Niigonwedom Sinclair’s negative review of her book, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation. As part of her rebuttal, Widdowson hotly disputed Mann’s account of the ancient Cahokia mounds site (located in what is now the US state of Illinois).

Do you just want to skip ahead to the smackdown?

The material in my book is not “exclusively based on the existence of large mounds of earth” but on decades of fine scholarship and hard work by dozens of researchers. As I said, I have not read Dr. Widdowson’s book and know little of her work. But it does not give me confidence that she is apparently willing to publish assertions that a simple Google search would have disproven.

Oh, snap!