The previous prevailing wisdom held that outside of the Aztecs and the Inca sophisticated urban settlement didn't prevail in the Amazon due to the "Green Desert" hypothesis and primitive tools.
This research confirms early Spanish chronicles, previously derided as fanciful, that vast urban settlements existed along rivers for many miles and would stretch continuously for hours as they travelled down river.
1491 was eye opening for me in the same way that few books are. Others that come to mind:
Guns Germs and Steel
Godel Escher Bach
It's worth reading the quick overview in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Critici...
I'm not saying it shouldn't be eye-opening, but just that you should take it with a large grain of salt. It's not as definitive as is commonly thought.
"has almost no role for human agency—the ability people have to make decisions and influence outcomes. Europeans become inadvertent, accidental conquerors. Natives succumb passively to their fate."
Assumes a conquest due to technological and other disparities implies a lack of human agency on both sides. Why wouldn't the level of human agency everywhere remain roughly constant pre and post colonization regardless of what happened? The only way I can make sense of this is if the writer assumes 'human agency' is some magical force that can overcome every other factor.
"Diamond's account makes all the factors of European domination a product of a distant and accidental history"
Assumes all 'factors' arose as a result of events in the distant past. Gunpowder, which was spread from China via the silk road, clearly and immediately was put to use fairly soon after the Spanish got hold of it, within a few generations.
etc.
From the paper: "Here we present lidar data of sites belonging to the Casarabe culture (around ad 500 to ad 1400)10,11,12,13 in the Llanos de Mojos savannah–forest mosaic, southwest Amazonia, revealing the presence of two remarkably large sites (147 ha and 315 ha) in a dense four-tiered settlement system. "