Americas Before the Arrival of Columbus

Because written accounts of the pre-contact Americas are limited or nonexistent, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what the continent would have been like had a traveler traversed every portion of its diverse terrain. The landscape, ecology, and climates were as diverse as its people. While there were some large nations of Native Americans with some small-scale urbanization in North America, the region was not densely populated. The more urbanized regions of Central and South America belie the fact that these were also mainly rural regions with disparate and scattered populations. Therefore, it is impossible to definitively answer the question of what the Americas were like before Columbus’s arrival.
It is possible, however, to consider what the Europeans did bring with them when they arrived. Diseases were of course the most devastating thing the Europeans brought, perhaps even more so than their advanced weapons. In some areas, almost the entire population was decimated; one of the primary effects of contact was “to wipe out between two-thirds and 90 percent of the people in the Americas (“In '1493,' Columbus Shaped A World To Be.”). The reason why the Native Americans succumbed so rapidly to diseases like small pox and influenza is rooted in biology and epidemiology; basically the populations of the Americas lacked the antibodies Europeans had built up and passed on for generations. The majority of Native Americans were hunter-gatherers who kept no livestock, too, and living in close quarters with animals is one of the main causes of disease (“In '1493,' Columbus Shaped A World To Be.”).
The view that Native Americans lived in total harmony with nature and barely left any ecological footprint is, however, false. One only need to consider the example of Easter Island to realize how a pre-contact civilization can easily destroy natural environment with hardly any advanced technologies. In North America, Native Americans who were not hunter-gatherers and who did practice agriculture would have left a tremendous ecological footprint. Agriculture can place strain on the land, and dramatically and irreversibly alter both ecology and climate (Mann 2002). Recent archaeological research from Bolivia reveals startling evidence that some pre-contact civilizations altered their landscapes in almost unimaginable ways: creating “forest islands” that allowed them to grow non-native trees, comprising “30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways,” (Mann, 2002). This research contradicts what many people believe about what the Americas looked like before Columbus. Many do continue to buy into the myth that the Americas were pristine and the civilizations not sufficiently advanced enough to make alterations to their local environments.
Major factors that prompted the conquest were mainly economic in nature, but also driven by political expediency. European monarchs battled for power continually, leading to competition for resources. The aggressive approach taken by European settlers is partly due to ignorance and prejudice, but also due to the determination to dominate and gain access to natural resources. Columbus himself brought with him European prejudices and biases, believing in the superiority of Christianity and other features of European culture. Columbus and his ilk encountered ways of life and customs completely unique from anything they had witnessed in Europe. Ultimately, thought, belief in European cultural superiority fueled the belief that the lives of Native Americans, their cultures, and their civilizations were less worthwhile than those of the Europeans. Granted, many explorers and early settlers did develop a great deal of respect for the people they encountered. Rather than focus on similarities, common goals, and what they could build together, though, the Europeans took advantage of the population decimation that disease caused and used that as leverage to conquer the continent.




References

“In '1493,' Columbus Shaped A World To Be.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/138924127/in-1493-columbus-shaped-a-world-to-be
Mann, C.C. (2002). 1491. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/