who discovered America?

Christopher Columbus

• (1451-1506)

• Italian explorer who completed four trips across the Atlantic Ocean for Spain

  • sponsored by Spain’s monarchs

• goal of these voyages was to create a more economical route to Asia in support of the spice trade

• never actually made it to North America

• his voyage did inspire many others which resulted in the European colonization of the Americas

Amerigo Vespucci

• (1451-1512)

• Italian explorer who completed two trips across the Atlantic ocean

  • one for Spain and one for Portugal

• in 1501 during his Portuguese expedition while in Brazil, Vespucci claimed that he was on a previously unknown continent which he called the “New World”

• this resulted in cartographer Martin Waldseemüller to name this continent “America” in 1507 in a widely printed volume

  • other cartographers followed his lead

so, did Columbus discover America

who did?

• the “Native American problem“

  • (for Columbus, and his contemporaries)

  • white colonizers arrived and found non-white “uncivilized“ people in a new world

  • these people also had no knowledge of anything European/old world

    • who the heck are these people

early ideas about native Americans

• this was a time when the bible was considered a sacred and factual text

  • all humans descended from Adam and Eve

  • Noah’s three sons represented the three races of humanity

    • Europeans, Asians, Africans

    • but this did not explain how native Americans originated

• maybe the lost people from Atlantis?

• Speculation in the mid-1500s suggested Native Americans could be one of the lost tribes of Israel?

• José de Acosta was a Jesuit Missionary in Peru in the late 1500s

• He believed that wild animals in the New World must have come from the Old World after Noah’s flood

  • If animals could, then maybe humans could have too!?

so where did native Americans come from?

• As early as 1794 people were becoming convinced that Native Americans came from Asia through the Bering Strait

  • Today there is an ocean between Eurasia and North America, but in the past, sea levels were lower, and these land masses were connected

    • This connection is called Beringia or the Bering land bridge

    • 

• there are lots of different ways the peopling of the new world is studies

  • archaeological sites

  • skeletal comparisons

  • DNA comparisons

Clovis culture

• Paleoamerican culture is described based on its characteristic stone point

• Clovis points are named based on their original finding near Clovis, NM

• for a long time, it was assumed that the Clovis people were the first native Americans

• Clovis points are found throughout the US

  • date to around 10,000 years BP

  • 

Meadowcroft rock shelter

• located in Pennsylvania

• Originally excavated in the 1970s as a methodological experiment to show the importance of painstakingly slow and precise excavation

• Decided to keep excavating deeper than necessary just to see what they might find

• Found what was at the time, the earliest evidence of human occupation in all of North America

  • ~16000 years BP

• 

• 

legacy of Meadowcroft

• this led to the more systematic investigation of other prehistoric sites and the identification of other sites that were much older than expected

vikings though?

• Norse stories passed down for generations mention Leif Eriksson in the New World around 1000 AD

  • “Saga of the Greenlanders“

  • stories recount travels in the new world and violent encounters with local native people

    • violent encounters are possibly why the Vikings did not return after they left

• It was not until relatively recently that any archaeological evidence was found to support these stories

  • 1960 Viking settlement found on coast of Newfoundland

    • Site has since been dated to 1021 AD

why do we still celebrate Columbus Day

• “it’s about celebrating what he represents in
  terms of power and domination of a
  European empire”

  • “Political pawn positioned in American countries
    today to denigrate Indigenous people and to
    remind them that they are inferior to anything
    signifying European civilization”

    • -NOÉ LÓPEZ

Indigenous People’s Day?

• Originally created in 1990 in South Dakota, Indigenous People’s Day has increasingly grown in popularity

  • SD has the 4th largest population of Native Americans in the US

  • President Biden officially recognized it in 2021 and there has been a push to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day as the official federal holiday