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The following guest contribution is but the latest in a series of back-and-forth posts first inspired by mediaINDIGENA‘s Niigonwedom Sinclair and his review of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation.

The review prompted a rebuttal by one of Disrobing‘s co-authors, Dr. Frances Widdowson. In her piece, Widdowson criticized Sinclair’s citation of Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Mann subsequently responded. What follows here constitutes the first of Widdowson’s two-part counter-response to Mann. (Note: footnotes may be found at the conclusion of this post.)

In my response to Niigonwedom Sinclair’s review of Disrobing, I questioned Sinclair’s use of Charles C. Mann’s 1491 as a source. My discussion of Mann, unfortunately, was not based on an in-depth examination of his work, or the evidence that Mann used to support his assertions. There is also an error in my statement that “Mann’s speculations with respect to Cahokia are exclusively based on the existence of large mounds of earth.” The word “exclusively” is too categorical a term, and “largely” would have been a better description.  Finally, my poetic reference to Mann’s “flights of imagination” was not meant to imply that Mann “made this stuff up.”  As will be discussed in further detail below, it refers to Mann’s tendency to “sew a shirt on a button” – that is, to make highly speculative and improbable claims on the basis of very scant archaeological evidence.

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