ABSTRACT
Among the great world culture areas Latin America stands unique, in many ways still a New World, largely unknown and unstudied. The extraordinary fact of its discovery, and the infinitely complex process of its absorption into the larger world, begun on the shores of Hispaniola in 1492 and still in process, represents one of the great epics of human experience. Work in Latin America by English-speaking geographers has been strongly dominated by the historical approach, often with a strong environmental emphasis. Geographical work on Latin America often tends to fuse with that of cultural anthropologists and historians as in community studies and in studies of origins, spread, limits, and modifications of culture complexes or traits. The sparseness of the contributions of North Americans to the study of the physical geography of Latin America reflects, of course, the relatively low status of the physical side of our subject, a condition which the recent ecological awakening may be at long last changing.
