The Last Continent: prehistoric America in comparative perspective

Abstract

The prehistory of the Americas was never lost to view: the shell middens, ceremonial mounds, rock art and less conspicuous traces were parts of the landscape long before Europeans arrived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The ‘rediscovery’ of the continent is hence a questionable concept. Yet the long separation of the Americas from the rest of the world has given it a special status in the understanding of human social development. For whereas early historians, antiquarians and archaeologists might well question whether parallels between distant ends of the Old World might not, despite their separation, be the result of direct or indirect contact, the likelihood of contact between the Old World and the Americas, while never entirely discounted, has generally been dismissed as unlikely. Thus, the development of human society in the Americas, since the first settlement of the continent in the latter part of the last Ice Age, has been an independent and indigenous process: ‘from approximately 15,000 BC, when ancient peoples first entered the Americas, until roughly AD 1500, to speak in round numbers, there were two entirely separate populations on earth, one in the New World, one in the Old, each unaware of the other’ (Watson, 2012).