THE INVENTION OF PREHISTORY

What is conventionally known as the ‘discovery’ of America presented Europeans with a world they rapidly christened New. The first descriptions of this world were in no way new however, so much so that today they provide us with one of the most astonishing testimonies of the power by which a conceptual tradition conditions the observation of new phenomena. Throughout the century following Columbus' first expedition, the conquistadors and colonisers remained strongly attached to everything that had previously been imagined concerning the existence of some possible other world; the first representations of America were therefore inspired by images that preceded its discovery. The River Amazon was so called by Carvajal because, he asserted, women similar to those described by Homer had fought heroically against Orellana's soldiers at the mouth of the Rio Negro. The freakish Ewaipanomas, depicted by Raleigh as having eyes on their shoulders and mouths between their breasts, came straight out of Pliny's Natural History, having adorned many of the fanciful geographies of ‘Ethiopia’, Asia and the Far East.