Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
We are now, in 1992, searching to find the meaning of an event 500 years distant in time. For us as Americans the importance of the Columbian voyages is obvious. In the past ten years the great wealth of research, publication, and debate on ancient American cultures has made the impact on the Americas abundantly clear.
For Europe the impact is much less clear. We say that the old world ended almost immediately, that a new world came into being when Europe ended its isolation from America. By this we mean that European perceptions of world geography began to change as early as 1498 —not just dotting the map of the Ocean Sea with more islands, but perceiving that South America was a continent whose existence was never imagined by the ancients. We also mean that the natural world began changing from the old world of two separate ecologies into a new world-wide environment.