Articles by Charles C. Mann from Smithsonian Magazine

Carbon-dating techniques have now identified this ancient maize cob at about 950 to 1,000 years old.

What Ancient Maize Can Tell Us About Thousands of Years of Civilization in America

It took millennia, but America’s founding farmers developed the grain that would fuel civilizations—and still does

November 2018

The book was published so hastily the fuse bomb pictured on the cover was “ticking.”

The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation

'The Population Bomb' made dire predictions—and triggered a wave of repression around the world

January 2018

Stone steps descend as far as 500 feet into the Moray concentric agriculture terraces near Maras, Peru, crossing a temperature differential of some 60 degrees. Ancient innovators may have domesticated and hybridized plant species here, using temperature ranges to simulate conditions found across the far-flung Inca Empire.

What Endures From the Ancient Civilizations That Once Ruled the Central Andes?

To journey here is to roam through almost six thousand years of civilization, to one of the places where the human enterprise began

July 22, 2015

The Clovis Point and the Discovery of America’s First Culture

Beautifully crafted blades point to the continent’s earliest communities

November 2013

Native Intelligence

The Indians who first feasted with the English colonists were far more sophisticated than you were taught in school. But that wasn't enough to save them

December 2005