Rise of Prehistory

How did the New World fit into the prehistorical perspective that was emerging in the nineteenth century? The discoveries of Columbus and his followers and the imperial extensions of the conquistadores were incorporated without much difficulty into the "universal histories" of European tradition, though at first the political and cultural categories of the colonial intruders were imposed indiscriminately on the original inhabitants. The old theme of the four world monarchies was replaced by the modern succession of empires—Spanish, English, Dutch, French, and American—as a way of periodizing the grand narrative of Western history; and historians of all nationalities gave interpretations of the consequences of the opening of the new hemisphere. The old stereotypes of barbarism and civilization, too, were employed to distinguish not only the vanquished from the victors but also the primitive stages of historical development from those of material and spiritual culture, whether governed by laws of providence or of secular progress.

Early ideas of pre-Columbian history were based on old rumors, prophecy, and poetic visions going back to Dante and Petrarch, and not until the seventeenth century did scholars begin to pass beyond myth and ungrounded speculation to ethnographic inquiries into the origins of the Indian populations of the Americas, such as arguments for the Israelite origins of the Indians and Hugo Grotius's (Huigh de Groot; 1583–1645) choice of the Scandinavians. Indeed, wrote Justin Winsor, "there is not a race of eastern Asia—Siberian, Tartar, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, with the Polynesians—which has not been claimed as discoverers, intending or accidental, of American shores, or as progenitors, more or less perfect or remote, of American peoples" (p. 59)—and none of them, he went on to add, without some plausibility.

The Asiatic theory of American origins, upheld by Joseph-François Lafitau (1670–1740), Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), and Charles Lyell (1797–1875), was the most popular, although specific tall tales of Chinese discoveries were discredited; and it was reinforced by the fact of the narrowness of the Bering Strait and its frozen condition in winter. Long before the Norwegian author Thor Heyerdahl, ideas of Polynesian contacts were defended, and so were Welsh—even by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917)—and Irish claims. In 1843 William H. Prescott, confronting the question in the context of Mexican civilization, surveyed the myths and theories deriving from discredited notions of the unity of the human race and in the end rejected Hebrew, Egyptian, Chinese, or Tartar origins for East Asia—but in a period "so remote, that this foreign influence has been too feeble to interfere with the growth of what may be regarded, in its essential features, as a peculiar and indigenous culture." In other words, prehistory was largely a matter of speculation, and scholars should confine themselves to recorded and accessible periods.

Another question was that of the early contacts made by the Scandinavians and testified to by the Icelandic sagas written down by the thirteenth century and by later historical writings, including beginning with Olaus Magnus in the seventeenth century. Most controversial was the story of the voyages to Vinland, whether region or island, mentioned in the works of Adam of Bremen (d. 1081–1085) and Ordericus Vitalis (1075–?1142) as well as a number of other manuscripts. The problem was proving such claims, many of them arising from national pride, and the criteria for such proofs came to depend on increasingly strict and scientific standards of historical linkage. Arguments were supported by interpretations of myths, similarities of customs and rituals, intuitive etymologies, physical and cultural anthropology, comparative linguistics, and archaeology (later to be supplemented by radio-carbon and DNA testing); and though the standards and techniques change, the results are still coming in.