1491 is generally a good book, but this was not the mainstream consensus when it was written and the information available has changed somewhat in the interveni

1491 is generally a good book, but this was not the mainstream consensus when it was written and the information available has changed somewhat in the intervening decades. There are a lot of reasons to think that virgin soil thesis specifically is an insufficient explanation. I keep a link to Livi-Bacci's [1] essay to recommend on this topic. It remains approachable without having become severely outdated. Another good (though increasingly dated) critique is Jones' Virgin Soils Revisited [2], which unfortunately goes into quite a bit of detail about the biomedical issues with VST. [1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00116.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00116.x [2] https://doi.org/10.2307/3491697 https://doi.org/10.2307/3491697