ABSTRACT
Columbus’s four Atlantic voyages of discovery (1492–1502) revealed a new continent, populated by inhabitants whose very existence and utterly unfamiliar ways threatened to undermine the image of humanity long established in the Old World. The Amerindians, it is now widely assumed, are a Mongoloid people who, in remote pre-history, migrated from Asia to America, crossing at the narrowest point of separation of the two continents: the Bering Straits. By the Early Modern period, when they were first encountered by Europeans, they had long spread throughout the continent to form societies of varying degrees of development (see Figure 7.1). The people Columbus described were sedentary Caribbean islanders who lived in villages in simple log huts thatched with straw and practised rudimentary agriculture. The Portuguese navigators soon discovered the food-gatherers of Brazil. And later, in North America, French explorers would be confronted by hunters, and the English colonizers by semi-nomadic tribes who lived in camps. But the most astonishing of all these early European contacts with Amerindians came in the period 1519–32 when the Spanish extended their explorations from the islands of the Antilles to the American mainland. It was then that the conquistadores (conquerors) encountered new civilizations, densely populated empires based on large cities. The Spanish soldiers who marched with Hernán Cortés to the Valley of Mexico simply could not believe what they were seeing; some asked ‘whether it was not all a dream’ (Diaz del Castillo, 1963, p.214). Amerindian peoples at the time of Columbus (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="bibr7_r19">Morales Padrón, 1988</xref>, p.56) https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203984376/4f208d80-5c23-4999-9a8d-99bed47a9492/content/fig7_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
