 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Preuss. This lecture is going to look at Christopher Columbus's legacy in what we call the New World. We really mean North America. And we're going to look at the native people of North America. We are going to look at why the Spanish wanted to cross the Atlantic and at Columbus's legacy. The early Native Americans, the Paleo-Indians as they're sometimes called, began migrating to North America across land that was then above water because of the ice age ice caps. So the water table was much lower in the seas. And so you have this bridge up at the top part of this photograph in Asia. And it's connecting over across what's today the Bering Sea down into across the Atlantic and into North America beginning at Alaska and coming on down. And the migration began about 70,000 years ago, we think. And it lasted until about 10,000 years ago. So it was land that was available for a long time for settlers to cross for people to migrate over. They usually were hunter-gatherers moving in small bands. But about 12,000 years ago, the climate began changing and it began getting warmer. And so large game that many of these people hunted became scarce and the land changed. So people could now domesticate plants and smaller animals. For example, you have about 10,000 years ago, the development of what we would today call corn. The ability to domesticate agriculture and have plants and animals allowed for a secure food supply or a more secure food supply than that of hunters and gatherers. And so you do have population growth because people are able to reproduce more. And if you have population growth, you're also going to have permanent settlements. And you're also going to have a diversification not only of the food, but of people's roles in society. And you have the development of religion, the development of trade, gender roles, become more fixed leadership roles. Now not all cultures are going to adapt to this change at the same rate across the world, but many did. And you have people who are hunter-gatherers, fishers, and then you also have people who are developing agriculture as well. In North America, the people began developing civilization. About 3,000 years ago, you have the development of more modern cultures in North America. And some of these are the Adina Hopewell, about 800 BCE. These were mound builders. They lived among the Ohio River Valley and made large mounds, often representing people or animals. Then later on, moving further south along the Mississippi River, you have what's known as the Mississippian culture. And this develops about 25, 2600 years ago. And the largest city that they possessed was one in what's today East St. Louis. And it's called Cahokia. It's a World Heritage site. And you can visit it today. They've excavated two large temple mounds there. Further south, in the Four Corners region, the New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada region, and that area, you have Pueblo cultures or Pueblo-Holcom cultures, which still exist today. Mesa Verde is also another place where there were large Pueblos built. And then further south in that, you have in what is today called Tenochtitlan, actually what is today called Mexico City, it was called Tenochtitlan, the development of the Aztec Empire. And they were around about 1200 to about 1500 when the Spanish conquered them. Now let's look at why Europeans came across the Atlantic in the first place. Now we think that sometimes Christopher Columbus was the first person and that certainly is not true. We have evidence, although it was largely a myth, a legend before, that about the year 1000 Vikings came and settled in north of New England in what's today Newfoundland and Canada. Those villages have been unearthed, excavated, and we now know the Vikings did actually settle here. Probably fishing, but they didn't return. There were some myths that had developed in the Iberian Peninsula, what's now Spain and Portugal, about a land of youth across the Atlantic. There was also a myth of seven cities of gold and these were golden treasures that Spanish bishops had taken when the Muslims come up from North Africa and invaded the Iberian Peninsula. And when islands off the coast of Africa, the Azores were discovered about in the 1420s, people began putting a little bit more faith into these myths and legends. One of the other things that the Europeans had, and this is a common myth that we have today, is that Columbus and the people at that time thought the world was flat. Most people and most educated people knew the world was round. Most sailors knew the world was round as they had sailed and seen the curvature of the earth. So the thing that they didn't know, however, was how big the world was. They were kind of going off of ancient Greek calculations and they thought the world was about 5,000 miles smaller than it really is. And so they did not realize there was a large continent between Europe and Asia. And what was their mindset? Well Europeans, we have to remember, when they came over wanted to recreate Europe. They wanted to recreate what they knew at the time. And that's not unlike many people today. When we travel abroad or into other countries, we want to take with us what is familiar. One writer has said that they, what they wanted to do was recreate the new world in their own image. European society at that time, it was a religious society, of course. You had Catholics and you had Muslims in the Spanish area. And they had been fighting for over 700 years to retake control of the Iberian Peninsula from the Ottoman Turks. And so this was a religious war that ebbed and flowed over the centuries and it was very much built into their mindset. The Encomienda system. This was a system of enslaving people and putting up large haciendas so that they could, landowners could enslave the people that lived on the land. It's very much rooted in European nobility's tradition that peasants worked for the landowner and essentially were owned by the landowner. It was a hierarchical society. And by that I mean, we think of hierarchy today in the military where you have commanders and you have people underneath them. But life was like that in many respects for Europeans. The church was hierarchically organized. Government was hierarchically organized. Society was hierarchically organized. And so everything moved from the people who were the best people at the top to the average person at the bottom. And it was also a mercantilistic society. Now what does that mean? The economy was mercantilistic. It meant that in their eyes, colonies and other lands were there to serve the benefit and purposes of the homeland. And so colonies were simply to be exploited. And so were the people on there by the way. So that was their mindset. They were an acquisitive people. They wanted to gather things. The only way of getting gold was to take it from somebody else or to find it. And so they wanted wealth. In Europe, they needed wealth. You had a whole bunch of rulers who were trying to establish kingdoms at this time. And trade between the east and west was equally important because they wanted the goods and services from the east in Europe. At the time, there were also technological advances. And what is today Portugal? Prince Henry, the so-called navigator, established a school or a think tank for people from the Arab world, from the Christian world, from the Jewish world to come together, engineers and scientists to discover new ways of advancing navigation on the seas. And this was beginning to have influences on the way boats were built, ships were built, and in the way people sailed. And so they can now sail outside of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. Before that, it was simply too dangerous. There was also religious zeal. I mentioned this idea of taking back the land from the Ottoman Turks. And you certainly influence, you see this influence in the Crusades of the 1100s when they wanted to retake the Holy Land, the Middle East. And the expansion of the Ottoman Turks from Africa and into the Middle East on up into Europe, this led to the Reconquista, the Spanish, for example, the Reconquista. How do we take it back? And we must take it back. And you have a militaristic society that develops around this. Now there were some early successes at sailing. You had Bartolome Diaz and Vasco de Gama who sailed around Africa and were trying to establish trade with India. And de Gama eventually made his ships, made it to India. So there was this idea of needing to explore and acquire and having the technology to do it. Now when Columbus set sail and took advantage of some of this new technology, he left Spain in August of 1492. And it wasn't until October that they sided land. In the meantime, the governments of Portugal and the governments of Spain divided the world. These are the two countries that had used Henry the Navigator's techniques and his discoveries in the field of navigation in order to sail around the globe. And because Portugal had pretty much sailed east around Africa and on into India, it was a disagree that they would get the eastern part of the world while the Spanish would get the western part of the world. And this was divided, actually, this is why the Portuguese get Brazil because it's on the eastern side of that line and they were there first. Now, what was Columbus's significance? Well, he sparked European interest in the New World, in North America, a place that they hadn't known before. And so because of the technology that they could repeat that adventure, Europeans began going regularly to the New World. Now, a big surprise were all the people and animals living there in the New World, people and animals they had never seen or heard of before. And so for many, they thought this may be a new creation, a creation that wasn't in the Bible that they didn't know about. And it confused many of the Europeans as to who the Native Americans were and what those new animals were and were they the same as everybody else? And I want to talk also about another part of the legacy of Columbus. And that was the Columbian exchange. We talk about this quite a bit. This Columbian exchange is, as one historian has described it, the greatest biological revolution in the Americas since human beings came over. This meeting of the old world and the New World, Europe and Africa and North America, exchanging animals, exchanging people, exchanging food, exchanging disease. That is the Columbian exchange. And when we look at this and look at the differences that Columbus made, this is why it's named after him, is because his ability to come to the New World and the people who followed him brought about this rapid exchange. And so let's look at some of the animals that were new to Europeans. They had never seen before. Now, some people may not like rattlesnakes and think, well, it would be better if we never knew them. But there's other animals, too, that they didn't know what they were and they wanted to find out more about them. They were foods that Europeans had never seen or tried before. Potatoes, beans, pineapples, chili peppers, pumpkins, cotton, many things that were new to Europeans. But there were also things that Europeans brought with them that people in the New World had never seen before. Onions, radishes, grapes to make wine, olives to make olive oil and to eat, just as importantly, were the animals like horses, cattle, pig, sheep and goats and rats. Many of these traveled with the explorers, with the conquistadors as they came to the New World and were allowed to run wild once they came in because there was no fencing. They were just rounded up later, but they also bred and they multiplied in their numbers and took over large parts of the New World and thus helped to spread some disease. So you see what happened as a result of Columbus's landing. Who were the native people of North America? They were descended from prehistoric migratory people who came from Asia largely. There probably may have been other routes and there may have been some people who were in boats who traveled over further south, but largely they came from Asia. And by the year 1500, they had developed many long established settlements and empires in the New World. So Columbus wasn't just coming to a bunch of uncivilized barbarians. He was actually coming in and finding civilizations. Why did the Spanish want to cross the Atlantic? Well, they simply wanted to look for a new way of continuing the trade they had already established with Asia. And now they had the technology because of new sailing techniques, because of new ways of building ships and sails that they were able to repeat this time and again. And what was Columbus's legacy? His miscalculation, this accident on the location of Asia, sparked interest of all of Europe in the people and places of North America. And they now had the ability to continue to do that. And the effects of that repeated contact were tremendous. Thank you very much for listening. We'll see you soon.