2: The Old World and the New- First Phases of Encounter, 1492-1750

WHEN COLUMBUS "discovered" America, the urbanized Native societies of the Southeast and Southwest had already been in decline for more than a century, as a consequence of migrations caused by drought, warfare, and other upheavals. Even so, after 1492 the rate and level of decline among Native cultures throughout the Americas intensified exponentially in ways difficult for us to imagine. The Taino of the Caribbean, for example the first Natives encountered by Columbus-were virtually extinct by 1550, as a result of epidemic and suicide following enslavement by the Spanish. The Conquest also toppled the great civilizations of the Aztecs, in Mexico, and the Incas, in Peru. Scholars hotly dispute estimates of the indigenous American population before and after Columbus, but some assert that as many as nine out of ten Native people died as a result of the invasion. "We are crushed to the ground; we lie in ruins," wrote a Nahuatl (Aztec) poet.

This chapter will consider the "New World" that took shape between the arrival of Columbus and the establishment of permanent English, Spanish, and French settlements. This phase of first encounter produced a range of transformations and adaptations of built forms, materials, and symbols as a result of cultural exchange between European and Native. On the eastern seaboard, the English encountered the Algonkian peoples of Virginia and North Carolina; in Florida, the French made contact with the Timucua Indians; and in New Mexico, the Spanish attempted to convert the Pueblo peoples, after subduing them by force. These Native cultures shared some common characteristics: they were settled societies that subsisted by agriculture, trade, hunting, and fishing. But in each case the encounters differed, depending on the specific conditions and parties involved. We shall retrieve the varied histories of these encounters from early visual representations of the "New World" made by Europeans, and from objects, dress, architecture, and ritual performances made by the Native peoples and European colonizers in these various regions.

This chapter also examines the distinctive motives and methods of the English, the French, and the Spanish, along with differences among the societies whose labor they used, and with whom they traded, made war, and eventually settled into a tense and unstable relationship. Interweaving these separate stories of conquest and colonization highlights both differences and similarities in their parallel histories, and in the arts that resulted from what were often cataclysmic encounters. We will see how religious attitudes, colonizing methods, material culture, and imbalances of power affected the outcomes. By presenting these histories-and art histories-together, we hope to portray the varieties of first-encounter experience through the lens of the arts that resulted

Thumbnail: JACQUES LE MOYNE, René de Laudonnière and Chief Athore of the Timucua Indians at Ribaut's Column ( detail), 1564. Watercolor on vellum. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library.