ABSTRACT
A millennium ago, the sunrise over North and South America lit places undreamed of by the rest of the planet these places would, after 1492, become a 'New World'. The people of the New World were diverse, extending from the Arctic realms to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. The descendants of the encounters have many legitimate questions about the events, as do historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, biologists, and theologians the list is long. Only fourteen generations of seventy years stacked end to end separate us today from AD 1000, yet the world around a thousand years ago was very different from the global community of which we are a part of today. New societies would form, old societies would change, and some aspects of various cultures were resilient and survived. This is the legacy of culture contact.
