Part 1: Colonies, Lesson 1: Before Columbus
The Americas Before Columbus Showed Up
Welcome! This is going to be a series of short, bite-sized lessons in American history. They are going to be different than what you learn in your average history class. They are going to include some swearing, some inconvenient facts, and a decidedly unconventional style. I’m focusing this on American (that is, United States) history because that is my specialty. I’m going to start at the beginning, before Columbus, and work my way to the modern day. I plan to put out two lessons a week for now and each one should take you under ten minutes to read. Questions and comments are welcome, but I will NOT tolerate trolls on my page, so if that’s you, get thee back under thy bridge. For everyone else, welcome. The first lesson is going to be about Prehistory through October 11, 1492.
Yes, that’s a huge amount of time, but my focus is on U.S. history, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the “before” times right now.
No discussion about American history would be complete without at least a mention of what came before. Contrary to what many of us were taught in school, American history did not begin the day a certain egomaniac set foot on a Caribbean Island in 1492. America was not the first nation to rise in the Americas; it might not even be in the first dozen. Did you know that one of the largest and most technologically advanced cities in the entire world in 1492 was not in Europe but in South America?
The Conquistadors destroyed it. Along with many other priceless bits of history.
Prehistory
Disclaimer
Prehistory is extremely complicated. I am NOT a prehistory specialist. What we know about prehistory is fragmentary, and the farther into the past we go, the less we know. American history pre-Columbus spans tens of thousands of years, two continents, millions of people, hundreds of different societies and cultures, and several high civilizations. Therefore, almost everything said about prehistory should be taken as a generalization or a theory, and not exact truth.
It's difficult to talk about prehistory, but I’m going to make the attempt. This will be a brief lesson, both because all of these are brief and because I am not a specialist in this area. See my disclaimer above.
So, why is it so hard to talk about prehistory? For one thing, there are no written records. The written word is an exceedingly good way of transmitting records down through the ages -hence why you can look up the writings of Pliny the Elder or read Beowulf, despite both being millennia in the past.
Without written records, we have to rely on other clues for our knowledge about much of prehistory. Oral records can suffice for much information, but at best they will get you fragmentary information on a few hundred years. Prehistory in the Americas stretches back at least THIRTEEN THOUSAND YEARS and even longer in the rest of the world.
What else can we use? Carbon dating is the primary tool used for time dating in prehistory. There’s a problem with that too -most of the things people create wear out, degrade, and decay within a few decades or less. Clothing, hides, and even housing tend to be biodegradable and are gone long before archeologists come around looking for them. The things that can be carbon-dated run towards stone, metal, and ceramics.
All of this together means that accurate dating starts for most of the continents (certain areas excepted) with the arrival of Columbus. Because of that, I’m going to spend a paragraph or two describing what we are fairly certain about prehistory and then describe the two continents as they existed when Columbus arrived in 1492.
The first hard evidence of settlements in North America dates back to the Clovis period, 13,000 years ago, but we have indications that settlement may have begun as long ago as 20,000 years. The forebearers of today’s Native Americans crossed the Beringia land bridge from Siberia to North America either in small boats, on foot, or a combination of the two.
We used to think they crossed into the interior up in Alaska but now know that probably didn’t have due to the ice sheets. Those suckers took up most of the continents. Instead, they probably traveled south along the western edge of the continent by foot and with their boats, then into the interior somewhere in what is now the western part of the U.S. We have good evidence that they traveled by small boats this way up and down the coast of Asia, so there’s no reason our forebearers couldn’t do the same in America.
Sea level was much lower then, so evidence of this migration is mostly underwater. None of this happened overnight -we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years here. Generations upon generations We do know that they had reached South America no later than 11,000 years ago, possibly sooner.
The Americas When Columbus Arrived
Now we’re getting to the part you’re probably most interested in: what the Americas were really like when Columbus landed on that beach and claimed it for Spain. For one thing, it wasn’t the primitive, mostly uninhabited wilderness claimed by many of the later settlers (there are actually reasons for this you probably weren’t told in school that I’ll get to in a much later lesson).
Instead, the Americas were inhabited by tens of millions of people (the highest estimates put the population at 112 million). There were dozens or hundreds of distinct cultures. We know that at least 375 distinct languages were spoken. Religious beliefs differed widely and wildly. The various societies then in existence ranged from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled horticulturists to complex urban civilizations and many gradations in between.
In other words, these weren’t all the primitive “barbarians” most of us were taught about in school. Not that it would matter if they were -people are people and what happened to the indigenous population is horrific.
One example of societies alive and well in 1492 would be the Mississippi Mound Builders, which were still around when Cortez reached the area in the mid-1500s. The Incas had a populous empire in South America in the fifteenth century. Many other cultures had developed societies the equal of many of those in Europe (without the advantages of steel and gunpowder). And, of course, there were the Aztecs.
Let’s look at the latter for a moment, specifically at their capital city, Tenochtitlan. I’m choosing to talk about it because it was one of the largest and most technologically advanced cities in the world at the time. We know so much about it because the Spaniards took detailed notes and made many illustrations and paintings.
This city was located where Mexico City is today. Only three European cities –Constantinople, Paris, and Venice –could rival it in size. (It was FIVE TIMES the size of London.) Unlike European cities, it was clean, well-organized, and free of pests and pestilence. It had clean water brought in by aqueducts. It was prosperous and technologically and architecturally advanced compared to European cities. The Spanish were stunned by it, to say the least. It didn’t stop them from razing it, but they stopped to look at it first. I guess that’s something, at least? No, not really.
This was the situation prior to the arrival of one Christopher Columbus.
The world changed forever on October 12, 1492. The cultures of the new world would soon be decimated, their people destroyed and conquered, and new empires would rise. The “New World” would be conquered by the old thanks to swords, guns, and (especially) germs.
This is the conclusion of Lesson 1. Lesson 2 will focus on Columbus.
Here’s a painting of Tenochtitlan.
‘La gran Tenochtitlan en 1519”, painting by Luis Covarrubias, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City
Further Reading
• The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, Second Revised Edition, Edited by William M. Denevan
• The journals and letters of Christopher Columbus
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann
• Journals of the various Conquistadors
• American Colonies, by Alan Taylor