The exploration of Africa, the Americas, and the Far East expanded Europeans’ anthropological knowledge. Little anthropological data had been collected from these areas. Changes in archaeology were influenced by a literary approach to anthropological writing, but hindered by the deep acceptance of theological explanations for natural and cultural phenomena. These factors, coupled with the exoticism of regions that were new to European explorers, led to the ‘armchair speculation’ of the origins of the new peoples being met and the shape of their lives.
Europeans began to explore the coast of Africa below Morocco in the fifteenth century. Portuguese merchants returned with stories of fabulous kingdoms and cities in the interior of Africa. By the sixteenth century, African civilization had entered a troubled period as a result of economic decline, the overseas slave trade, and invasions from other nations. Despite earlier accounts to the contrary, Europeans convinced themselves that African culture had never become civilized and thus were able to justify their imperialism. Europeans accepted Herodotus’ and others’ accounts of Ethiopia because its pyramids, temples, and reliefs were akin to those visited in Egypt. Europeans refused to accept the idea of a complex Sudanese culture or that southern Africans could create substantial monuments, despite reports in the mid-sixteenth century of gold mines in the midst of masonry fortresses. Medieval Arab writers commented on rich trade in gold, ivory, animal skins, and iron from large cities along the eastern coast of Africa, which led some scholars to connect the region with the Biblical city of Ophir and to King Solomon’s mines.
Explorers from Europe were also seeing ruined cities in the Far East as they began to settle ports for trade. Robert Knox, a Dutch seaman, published an account of Anuradhapura on the island of Ceylon. His report made readers aware that the jungles held ancient evidence of civilization from times before the Europeans arrived. In 1790, a peasant plowing a field near Nellore in India stumbled upon the remains of a small Hindu temple that contained a pot filled with second-century AD Roman coins and medals. This was an unusual event, as much of the archaeological work consisted of exploration and documentation of visible temples and monuments.
European explorers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries offer some of the first accounts from a historical perspective on the New World, its people, and the landscape. Exploration of the Americas resulted in important academic findings and philosophical quandaries for Europeans. Willey and Sabloff characterize the era of exploration and recovery of information from foreign places as ‘the speculative mode of thought’. The explorers encountered new peoples and cultures, as well as unusual landscape features. They recorded ethnographic information and began rudimentary investigations. Theological interpretations dominated the discussions. Collections of archaeological data took place incidentally to these pursuits. The expeditions also collected documentation of Native Americans’ interests in history, such as chronicles, genealogies, or historical statements. These accounts have been preserved in the original or in postConquest copies. Most of the projects collected data that related to larger, exploratory trends in the ‘natural scientific’ spirit. Such work fed speculation about the natural and cultural makeup of the American continents and interest in exploitable natural resources.
Explorers to South America from Spain described the lives of the Aztecs and the Maya at the time of the Conquest. A few writers, such as Bernardino de Sahagan and Diego de Landa, also demonstrated approaches and questions that today could be considered archaeological. They were the forerunners of men and women in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who asked when events took place and what had happened, in conjunction with their descriptions of indigenous groups and ancient ruins. Governmental directives ordered a number of expeditions from Europe to the Americas, such as the sixteenth-century trek of Diego Garcia de Palacio to the Maya site of Copan, Honduras and of Antonio del Rio to Palenque, Mexico in the nineteenth century. Missionaries also collected information. Bishop Diego de Landa and Fray Bartoleme de las Casas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote about archaeological ruins and the history and way of life of the Mayan culture of Chichen Itza and other sites.
As Europeans investigated the Americas, they included in their reports of natural discoveries the indigenous peoples, natural resources, flora, and fauna. Although archaeology per se was not practiced, in these early centuries of the ‘contact period’, many explorers did collect anthropological information that would inform future archaeological investigations. Priests and administrators who accompanied the Spanish Conquistadores to Latin America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took accounts of American Indians. Today, these accounts offer archaeologists important information about the civilizations. Records of explorers such as Giovanni de Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier recorded information of ethnographic value, as well. The expeditions returned to Europe with information for speculators, ideas for settlements, natural specimens, and cultural souvenirs.
The scholars of North America, operating within a theology-centered worldview, began to speculate on the indigenous peoples’ origins. Theories postulated that the so-called ‘Indians’ might descend from Iberians, Carthaginians, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, Canaanites, and Tartars, or even came from the vanished island of Atlantis. Most hypotheses reflected the cultural values, biases, or predilections of different groups of settlers. Some early Spanish settlers, for example, did not believe that the Indians had souls and thus could not be human beings. This justified their program of exploitation. The Spanish Crown, however, insisted that the Roman Catholic Church proclaim Indians as human so that the government could assert its right to govern them. This also meant that Christians were forced to grapple with the ‘savages’ as people who also descended from Adam and Eve. Theological interpretations, however, were challenged by the increasingly influential scientific inquiries. Nonscientific conjecture, or armchair speculation, weighed in on topics such as the mounds of North America, or the developmental sequence for ‘primitive’ cultures. Such early speculations expressed the cultural views of the European explorers and immigrants and began to fan curiosity about the past of the New World.
Through the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment concepts of reason and progress philosophies sustained a belief that progress was inherent in the human condition. The settlement of North America by Europeans forced the issue as the intelligentsia conjectured about topics such as theological explanations of natural and cultural phenomena, the exotic realm of the unexplored New World, and an immediate need to create a heroic history for the new land. In the late eighteenth century in North America, ethno-centrism pervaded colonists’ cultural values toward indigenous peoples, whom they perceived to be savage and separate in origin from the builders of the mounds. Reports by the Spaniards of Tenochtilan, the capital of the Aztecs, the public works of the Incas, or the other great achievements of the Indians of Middle and South America, lent further doubt that the mounds of North America were capable of revealing such civilized places. Observations by De Soto’s party, for example, described the American-Indians building and using mounds in the southeastern United States, but this information was conveniently forgotten.
In North America, the ‘myth of Mound builders’ posited that a ‘lost’ civilized race built the mounds and ruins, but disappeared long before Europeans came on the scene. Europeans in the New World did not believe that the Indians were capable of building the mounds, particularly in comparison to what they judged as the grand public works of the Indians of Middle and South America. Racial myths eclipsed religious ones as justification for action against the Indians, who were widely seen to be brutal and warlike in nature and incapable of significant cultural development. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, two basic positions had emerged regarding the origins of the mounds: either the Mound builders and the Indians (or their direct ancestors) were one and the same people, or the Mound builders, whose hypothesized origins were as varied as those first proposed for the peopling of the New World, were an ancient race who had died off or moved away, to be replaced by the later Indians.
While others speculated about the origins of the earthworks, who built them, and why, Thomas Jefferson, a member of the American Philosophical Society, acted on the problem by investigating a small burial mound near the Rivanna River on his Monticello property in Virginia. The result was one of the first controlled, stratigraphic excavations in the world. This project has led to some call Jefferson the ‘father of American archeology’. Such endeavors shaped national politics by informing policy with information about Native American peoples.
World History
