ABSTRACT
Introduction The collision of the world’s cultures on North American soil began in 1492 CE, over five centuries ago, and it continues today. Prior to 1492 the peoples of Eurasia and Africa had almost no clue that the continents Columbus would call “the other world” even existed. Similarly, the peoples of what would come to be called the Americas had no idea that the continents and cultures of the Eastern Hemisphere existed until their ships began to appear offshore. Yet despite their separate evolutions from small bands of hunter-gatherers to states and empires the peoples of the two worlds were remarkably similar in many fundamental ways. To understand how those similarities arose so independently is to understand the cultural evolution of all human societies. To understand how history played out after the collision of those previously independent domains is to understand cultural conflict everywhere. The desire for those insights and understandings is what frames the questions asked by modern archaeologists working in North America.
