“Discovering” America

Columbus didn’t think of himself as a discoverer, and perhaps you shouldn’t either. The

whole notion of discovery is insulting to the people who already lived in the Americas

and had no inkling that they were undiscovered.

Many different kinds of people lived in the Americas before Columbus arrived.

Columbus called the people he encountered on Caribbean Islands Indians because he

thought he was in Asia, so the original people of the Americas have been lumped

together under that label ever since (although some prefer to be called Native

Americans or Amerindians). No matter what you call them, these Americans were

never a single culture. They lived in widely differing climates, made their livings in

different ways, spoke different languages, and wore different clothes. Even their

origins were probably different.

Until late in the twentieth century, many scholars thought that all the pre-

Columbian Americans crossed a land bridge that linked Asia with Alaska between

20,000 and 10,000 years ago. Then archaeological finds began to suggest that at

least some people were living in the Americas much earlier and that different

groups arrived at different times.

By the time Europeans came, the Americas had seen civilizations rise and fall. The

Spanish arrived in time to see the great Mayan civilization of Mexico and the Yucatan,

although its impressive cities were in deep decline by the sixteenth century.

To the north of the Mayan cities in the highlands of central Mexico, the Spanish

military commander Hernan Cortés found a great city in 1519 that was at its peak: the

Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. Spanish soldiers said that Tenochtitlán, with its brightly

painted pyramids and broad causeways linking the island city to the mainland, was as

magnificent as Rome or Constantinople. The Spaniards went on to wreck it, of course,

but nobody ever said conquest is pretty

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