The first Europeans came to South America and the Caribbean searching for the East Indies and stumbled across a new world in which they would ravage and dismantle the Native people’s previous way of life. The explorers came with the goal to spread Christianity, but also sought the fortune that the new land would bring European voyagers stumbled across a vast landscape full of flourishing societies, not just roaming tribes, and they saw nothing more than opportunity for their own greed. This greed would lead to the once self-sufficient people becoming slave workers before eventually disappearing from the region altogether.
Spanish royalty gave explorer Christopher Columbus the power to travel east in exploration to gain wealth for Spain and
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Archeologists Clark Erickson and William Balée studied portions of the Bolivian landscape, for example, where they found remnants of a civilization that left behind “roads, causeways, canals, dikes, reservoirs, mounds, raised agricultural fields and possibly ball courts.” Furthermore, Erickson and Balée discovered massive geoglyphs that these tribes were not only developed but had the labor with the ability to plan and execute these marvels.
Christopher Columbus would encounter many non-sedimentary tribes that did not have the capitalistic mentality that the Europeans did. These Indigenous tribes traded for utility purposes, which is why they had no issue giving their gold to the invaders. The survival mindset allowed for the Natives to make unimaginable advancements. Charles Mann notes how the ancient Indian farmers had taken teosinte, a rather nutritious lacking crop, and turn it into modern day maize. Mann states it is “a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades how it was
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Upon Columbus’ first arrival, the Natives brought them parrots, cotton, javelins, etc. and the Spanish traded glass beads and bells in return. According to Chasteen, when encounters that “had begun with trading but rapidly degenerated into slaving.” Unfortunately, disease and abuse would lead to the Caribbean people disappearing, and the slave trade would bring African slaves across to run the newly founded plantations. Disease and death not only ravaged the Caribbean but the mainland as well. In Brazil, the Portuguese had begun colonizing the coastline around 1530 and within years the “Tupi society was swept away by disease and replaced by Brazilian sugar