There are many ways to contrast the formation of the Spanish Empire with the disarticulation of the New World’s indigenous societies. In any perspective, it is vital to emphasize the resistance and adaptation of the native peoples, increasing the historical veracity of accounts. And our perception of the present would be false if we assumed that the historical interpenetration of the two systems had been concluded. The America nations of today are not simply the result of western occupation, but evince through their achievements, as well as their shortcomings, the continuing encounter. This construction through negation is also the source by which we explain the social behaviour and cultural products of the American peoples – especially its high cultures, whose populations resisted more successfully the violent wars of conquest and exploitation of resources.

Introduction

Brian Fagan’s declaration about the ‘clash of cultures’ applies to contemporary Mesoamericans and South Americans as it does to North Americans. We have passed beyond the age of the ‘Black Legend’, perhaps not entirely, but enough to regard the ‘Columbian exchange’ (Crosby 1973) as a massive confrontation of peoples, the emotional reverberations of which have not entirely disappeared, but whose effects a few of us can measure with scientific objectivity.