ABSTRACT
When Christopher Columbus accidentally landed in the tropical New World while trying to find a westward route to Asia, the region already was inhabited by peoples he erroneously called Indians. Within little more than a century of their discovery, however, the aboriginal peoples of the Circum-Caribbean – and their socio-cultural systems – had disappeared. The broad region stretching from the Atlantic shores of northeast Brazil in the south, along the coastal lowlands of northern South, Central and southern North America into the southern United States to the north, and including the islands in the Caribbean Sea, had become colonial dependencies of the competing nation-states of Western Europe; and plantation societies, producing commerical crops to be sold in the markets of Europe, worked by a labour force composed primarily of enslaved Africans, had been established as what was to be the institutional form that was to dominate society and culture in the area for centuries to come.
