Most children grow up hearing that Christopher Columbus "discovered America," which implies that the explorer found the area that is now the United States. In fact the closest he came was the modern-day Bahamas; John Cabot, who explored the coast of Delaware in 1497, was actually the first European to reach the future United States.
It is much more accurate to say that Columbus discovered the New World. Yet this statement raises a question. There were already as many as 40 million people living in the Western Hemisphere when he arrived. Why do people not say that the first Native Americans, who arrived in the New World thousands of years earlier, "discovered" it?
To some people, it seems downright racist to say that Columbus, a white European, discovered the New World, as though the darker-skinned Native Americans did not matter. Yet there is at least some truth to the claim of discovery, because the Europeans, unlike the Native Americans, were in contact with the rest of the civilizations known at the time through writing and face-to-face communication. After Europeans "discovered" the New World, eventually all civilized peoples knew of it.
In fact Columbus was probably not the first European to arrive in the New World. It is quite likely that Vikings from Scandinavia in northern Europe visited in about A. D. 1000. They were certainly white—blond-haired and blue-eyed, even—but they were not civilized, and they did not "discover" the Western Hemisphere. Once again, like the Native Americans, and unlike Columbus and other explorers five centuries later, they did not pass this information on to the rest of humankind.
A painting of Vikings coming ashore in the Americas. The Library of Congress.
Where the Olmec lived is just to the west of the peninsula, in a large bay along the Gulf of Mexico.
At the height of the Olmec civilization, the area under their control was about 7,000 square miles (18,130 square kilometers), with a population of around 35,000 people. The name Olmec means “people of the rubber country,” a reference to the fact that they were the first Mesoamerican culture—and perhaps the first in the world—to extract rubber from rubber plants.
Olmec agriculture depended on slash-and-burn techniques as well as the building of river levees (LEHV-eez; dikes) to provide irrigation by occasionally flooding their fields with river water. “Slash-and-burn” was exactly what it sounded like. The Olmec would simply cut down all the trees in a part of the rain forest and begin planting crops there. From the standpoint of the environment, it was not a good practice, but slash-and-burn farming was a typical method among many ancient American peoples.
Many of the Olmec dwellings were built into hillsides. Other Indian tribes, like those in the Northwest United States, built longhouses with ornate doorways, like the one in this photo. Corbis. Reproduced by permisison.
World History
